python for everyday tasks

[Ned Batchelder]

On Friday, November 22, 2013 6:59:19 PM UTC-5, koch... at gmail.com wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm about held a short course with the title indicated in the subjects. The students are very experienced programmers of our company, with deep knoledge on C, C++, C#, Perl and similar languages, but very limited, or absolutely no knowledge on python.
> 
> what would you teach to such a group in 5x1.5 hours? I'm looking for the most interesting, unique topics, emphesizing python's strong points. 
> 
> I have already a couple ideas:
>  - a general intro about tuples, lists, dicts, sets, and working with these
>  - functional programming tools, functools, itertools, lambda, map, filter
>  - wsgi, pickle
> 
> I'd appreciate a lot if you could add some ideas
> 
> thanks, 
> Mate

I gave a 45-minute presentation at the DevDays conference in 2009 to introduce programmers to Python.  The slides are here: http://nedbatchelder.com/text/devdays.html  Sorry there's no text to go with them.

They introduce the good points of Python, then go through two code exercises: Peter Norvig's spellchecker, which is great for showing off data structures; and a micro templating engine, which takes advantage of Python's dynamic nature.

--Ned.