Intermediate Python - Steve Holden O'Reilly Media training video
What an excellent course, with lots of very useful information. Steve Holden, not only a python guru but also has an amazing ability to teach it would appear.
This really is for an intermediate level , you will certainly need to have been through some Python basics before, might be ok if you have a great experience in other languages, this will be useful to you but it will certainly help along the intermediate Python user.
Things covered include tuples, decorators, iterable and interators, slicing, dbapi and unicode as a main part of the code then additional video that introduce numpy, scipy and unit testing. Overall that make it a very comprehensive course for something of this level.
Steve has a very soft manner, making even the most complex of ideas seem fun and exciting, so much so that I finally understand how decorators really work and where they can be useful, something that I have struggled on for some time. Tied in with the fact that the course uses and has opensourced iPython notebooks makes the learning experience much greater. You have the code that john is using right there with you in a format that allows you to immediately play with and also alter, add and expand. so you can watch part of the video and follow along with your own code, no need to pause to type it all in, you can see what is happening as the video is playing but then you can also start poking around the code should you not clearly understand or if something has interested you. As is show in the course, any code that you have created can get exported should you want to start running it in any other environment. This ability to see someone work with the code but also have it there, in front of you in a friendly and fully interactive environment is amazing.
Why have I only given it 4.5, while it was nice to have so many things added in, such as the num and sci py and the matplotlib, I think one or two sections could do with expansion, in particular the unit testing. It was a nice introduction but it would be great if it was for more than the one thing and tried to get a bit more meat out of a real situation, checking the size of an object is not the greatest depth of test. Another minor bugbear is not having links easily accessible from the course page to iPython, the Notebook or the git repo where all of the courses notebooks are maintained.
I would certainly recommend this course to Python devs working their way up the learning but also, if you have had any experience in any other programming language, you will certainly see a lot of what python is capable of just by doing this course and be able to go off and start turning out code.
Once again O'Reilly a great piece of work and thank you very much to Steve Holden and his way of teaching.
4.5 out of 5