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Spring 2007 — CSE 399-004 — Resources

Course related

Class email list: cse399-004-07a@lists.upenn.edu . You are more than welcome to use this list to ask questions to each other, have discussions, and so on.
Class bulletin board
Previous years' websites: Spring 2006
Unix resources:
- A very quick intro to Unix
- How to log into Eniac and transfer files
Python on SEAS systems: Directions on setting up your SEAS account to use Python 2.5.
cse39904grade and cse39904submit: These command-line programs will allow you to turn in assignments and check your grades. They are not things you can run by somehow invoking the Python interpreter. You have two options for running these programs.
1. Run them directly as ~cse39904/bin/cse39904submit and ~cse39904/bin/cse39904grade.
2. Follow the directions above for modifying your SEAS environment to use Python 2.5. You can then run these programs as cse39904submit and cse39904grade.
In either case, passing the -h option to these programs (for example, cse39904submit -h) will cause them to print out a message explaining how to use them. Important: Pay special attention to who these programs think you are.

The bulk of these programs is written in Python; for reasons having to do with security and Unix-style file permissions, some of the code is not written in Python. Most of the Python source code for these programs is available for you to look at it if you're on the Penn network. Let me (Brian A.) know if you spot any bugs or holes. I trust that no one is going to use this knowledge to do anything malicious.

Python resources

Note: I (Brian) picked up (and am still picking up) Python from the official documentation, which is pretty reasonable in my opinion.

Python homepage:
- Download Python 2.5
- Download the documentation
- Official tutorial
- Library reference
- Language reference
- FAQs
- Wiki
- Beginner's Guide: Programmer's version and non-programmer's version
Debugging Python code: The usual "printf" (which would be print here) style of debugging works in Python. Debugging in Python is a gentle introduction to using the pdb module for debugging code written in Python. This module is also documented in the standard library.
Python editors: Plain old text editors such as vim, emacs, and xemacs will likely be perfectly fine for this class. Python comes with its own, simple development environment, IDLE, which can be run from the command line as idle. Additional documentation for IDLE is included in the library documentation.
Books: Safari Books Online (requires PennKey if off Penn network) has some books from O'Reilly under the category "Programming > Python". Dive Into Python, by Mark Pilgrim, is another online book. Python Books lists many more books.
A Quick, Painless Tutorial on the Python Language by Norman Matloff.
Python For Fun by Chris Meyers.