So this is a long shot, but is anyone here familiar with Python? I just started teaching myself with codecademy.com, and I'm now seeing how much easier it'll make my life to crawl pages like the US Patent Office to build a database of patent assignee locations (and other work-related things like that) but have little to no idea how to do that yet. It'd be really helpful if I could ask questions and get feedback from someone who knows and uses it regularly.
Python?
Started by
PatrickDougherty
, Jan 21 2015 10:50 AM
2 replies to this topic
#2
Pedro Cerrano
-
- Members
-
- 35,553 posts
I Miss McNulty
- LocationEllicott City, MD
Posted 21 January 2015 - 10:56 AM
First!
- MKlein76, SammyBirdland and PatrickDougherty like this
There is baseball, and occasionally there are other things of note
"Now OPS sucks. Got it."
"Making his own olive brine is peak Mackus."
"I'm too hungover to watch a loss." - McNulty
@bopper33
#3
Russ
-
- Members
-
- 9,296 posts
HOF
Posted 24 January 2015 - 03:16 AM
Keep in mind that codeacademy uses Python 2.7 in their course. There's also a 3.4 version. There isn't much difference between them except for some minor syntax stuff. Print is a function in 3.4 which just means you surround it with parentheses.
From what it sounds like you're doing, you'll probably be utilizing a few different packages: urllib2, beautiful soup, requests, matplotlib, numpy. The first couple come with the standard installation. The second two need to be installed through what's called PIP. All you do is go to the terminal and enter "python - m pip install" followed by the package name. There are also versions of the python interpreter you can download that has all of this stuff installed. Anaconda is one.
I mainly use python to solve math problems and experiment with algorithms. It's a fun language, easy to learn, not verbose like java or c++. And it's not strongly typed which comes in handy when you're dealing with large numbers and different data types. If you're ever interested in Web Development check out django or flask. There's tkinter for gui. Pygame for building games.
Python comes with an environment for you to code in, IDLE. When you start building projects, get an IDE. I use Eclipse with PyDev or sometimes PyCharm. Both free. Remember, anything you're trying to do in python someone has done before and then helpfully put their code on the Web. It's not cheating or stealing to reuse code. That's what it's there for.
From what it sounds like you're doing, you'll probably be utilizing a few different packages: urllib2, beautiful soup, requests, matplotlib, numpy. The first couple come with the standard installation. The second two need to be installed through what's called PIP. All you do is go to the terminal and enter "python - m pip install" followed by the package name. There are also versions of the python interpreter you can download that has all of this stuff installed. Anaconda is one.
I mainly use python to solve math problems and experiment with algorithms. It's a fun language, easy to learn, not verbose like java or c++. And it's not strongly typed which comes in handy when you're dealing with large numbers and different data types. If you're ever interested in Web Development check out django or flask. There's tkinter for gui. Pygame for building games.
Python comes with an environment for you to code in, IDLE. When you start building projects, get an IDE. I use Eclipse with PyDev or sometimes PyCharm. Both free. Remember, anything you're trying to do in python someone has done before and then helpfully put their code on the Web. It's not cheating or stealing to reuse code. That's what it's there for.
0 user(s) are reading this topic
0 members, 0 guests, 0 anonymous users
