How to Start

[DouhetSukd at gmail.com]

On Sep 13, 4:02 pm, Nikita the Spider <NikitaTheSpi... at gmail.com>
wrote:
> My $.02 for someone such as yourself
> is to deal with Python and as little else as possible. So write your
> code in a simple text editor like UltraEdit or Notepad

Second that opinion.  Use _your_ favorite basic text editor and run on
command line.  Don't clutter your attention with complex tools, yet,
Python's not J2EE for Pete's sake.  I started on Kedit, but mostly use
Eclipse + pydev now, with KEdit as a backup.

Do use one of the interactive interpreters (pythonwin, python prompts,
etc...) to try out one liners and short pieces of code.  But I've
never really liked them for writing full programs.

And I would just do the tutorial or Dive Into Python (http://
www.diveintopython.org/toc/index.html).  If you are as experienced as
you say, you should have very little trouble working through them,
really quickly (3-4 hours?) and you'll have a good tour of the
features.  I picked up Python on a Montreal to Vancouver flight, doing
just that.

For your problem domain.  Modules:  optparse, regular expressions.
Perhaps the "Text Processing in Python" book by Mertz.  I don't like
it much myself, but it does cover text processing in depth and it
refers to a number of existing specialized libraries.

Cheers