some pointers for a newbie

[Roy Smith]

John Evans <jevans at uiah.fi> wrote:
> So what i ask is, for someone who wants to dip his toe in the pond and 
> runs a powerbook with os x what tools, resources should I look into as 
> being the most useful?

I'm also running OSX on a PowerBook, so I guess we're kindred spirits.  
To a large extent, what tools you want to get depends on what you want 
to do with your new reptilian friend.

Are you interested in databases?  Then you might want to get mySQL 
running on your machine, and explore Python's database API.

Are you interested in web applications?  Then you might want to get 
Apache installed, and play with mod_python.

If you're interested in GUI programming, there are several Python GUI 
packages you can look at.  I'm not really into that kind of stuff, so 
I'll leave it to others to suggest which ones are the best.
 
> Also is it best to use an IDE like the one which comes from installing 
> macPython, or is it best to use a basic text editor, or perhaps even 
> xcode could be recommended (esp if I wanted to build some simple UI 
> using interface builder?)

Personally, I'm a big fan of emacs for programming, and ignore all the 
various IDE's.  That's not to say that they're not good or useful or 
powerful, just that they're not my cup of tea.  If you decide to go the 
emacs route, you definitely want to download the python mode support for 
emacs (it's on www.python.org somewhere).

Once you get a bit more serious and start to work on large-scale 
applications, I would certainly look at the junit module that now comes 
standard with Python.

The one major deficiency with the Python that Apple ships with OSX is 
that it doesn't come with readline support.  Readline is the thing that 
lets you interactive input editing and history processing (like bash and 
several other shells support on the command line).  I can't live without 
it, so I rebuilt Python from source (after downloading the GNU readline 
package and building that).  Getting a Python built with readline 
support will really improve your Pythonic experience.  I have no clue 
why Apple doesn't ship it that way.