[Tutor] Greetings

[dominic.fox]

Hi all,

I've just joined this list, and decided to dive right in rather than lurk as
I tend to find that participation increases my enjoyment of email lists (as
well as the likelihood of my reading anything that appears in them).

I'm a shortly-to-be-married 27-year-old father of a two-year-old boy, living
in Leicester, UK. Professionally I'm a VB-weenie working in the "Operational
Development" department of a moderately well-known financial institution. I
am getting rather sick and tired of VB; mainly I am sick and tired of its
collection classes, its piecemeal OO support, its general clunkiness and the
fact that to do anything really useful you have to hack the environment in
truly *abysmal* ways (I read a few pages of a highly-rated book on
subclassing and vtable jiggery-pokery, and thought: this is god's way of
telling you to program in a different language. Possibly a "harder" one, but
more importantly one that doesn't hide all this stuff away from you, then
make you go look for it anyway whilst repeatedly poking you in the eye with
a pointy stick).

Python appeals to me because, rather like Perl, it lets you wade right in
with all sorts of highly flexible and accommodating data structures - it
took about half an hour of playing with Idle for my hatred of VB collections
to crystallise into pure hard-boiled contempt. The shift from static to
dynamic typing is a bit vertigo-inducing, but Javascript's already softened
me up for that. Generally it seems like the language manages a good
compromise between slack and rigor.

I've got "Programming in Python" coming from Amazon. Anyone got any
suggestions for other helpful texts, especially for VB-weenies?

Dominic

--> Nobody knows the trouble you've seen / walking from your desk to the
staff canteen <--
homepage: http://www.geocities.com/domfox