Python Liberation Front

Simple Online CGI Version of Ask Merlin

OK, I couldn't resist, so here is a very much simplified version of Ask Merlin in an online CGI version. Try it out, it's fun! I am working on a more complete and complex online CGI version more like the command line program linked to in the post below, but for now you can enjoy the simple CGI version, while I travel on business matters.

Ask Merlin, a fun Oracle Program written in Python, answers any questions you may have

My program, askMerlin, is taking shape quite nicely now. The source code linked to above is complete, working code but it requires Mark Pilgrim's pyGoogle that uses the Google web api's.

The program is a Decision Analysis module, and it is designed to help a person make decisions, of any general type, or of a few specific types. The part that uses the Google api's is a re-write of my older web scraping scripts, and should therefore be more robust over time.

The askMerlin script is meant to be fun. I will soon have completed an online CGI version for folks to use on my web site, so you won't have to download and install pyGoogle or askMerlin itself.

In the meantime, I would appreciate it if anyone would be interested enough to download the Python source code above and give the program a try and let me know what you think of it and any suggested improvements you may make.

The code is 100% working but I do intend to make substantial improvements over time.

please stop by the

Discussion Forum

and leave us a message ;-)))

a Book Review of "Dive Into Python" by Mark Pilgrim, Apress 2004, 413 pages, ISBN 1-59059-356-1

This is a great book for experienced programmers who are looking to learn Python, and for Python programmers looking for a second Python book after an introductory text such as O'Reilly's "Learning Python". The book wastes no time with unnecessarily basic explanations but thoroughly covers what a programmer needs to know when learning a new language. The book makes excellent use of a reader's knowledge of other languages by using illustrations from C, Java, VB and Perl.

I found the book's coverage of internet and web programming to be particularly useful. Who could possibly be better then Mark Pilgrim, the creator of pyGoogle, to do this? There are five thorough chapters about such subjects, and the author's knowledge and explanations of SOAP and web services benefit from his extensive personal experience and expertise.

The author's style strikes a perfect chord with me, in that he offers clear explanations that always seem to dig deeply into topics that I find difficult, without ever wasting words on concepts I already understand. While your mileage may vary, this style allows me to make the most of my reading time, and it allows the author to cover several relatively advanced topics without creating an overly long book.

As one aspect of this direct and concise style, each major section of the book begins with a complete working program's source code, and that source code is then explained in its entirety, line by line, in brief but perfectly clear language that makes it impossible to not understand what the code is doing. The explanations are straight to the point and reading them tends to flow along smoothly, partly becuase of the author's superb sense of what a learning programmer really wants to know, and partly because he never wastes our time; and with all that he still manages to display a modest sense of humor.

The advanced topics covered include chapters on Unit Testing, Test-First Programming, Refactoring, Functional Programming, Dynamic Functions, and Performance Tuning; as well as the aforementioned coverage of internet programming that includes chapters on HTML Processing, XML Processing, Scripts and Streams, HTTP Web Services, and SOAP Web Services.

Another chapter that was very useful to me was "The Power of Introspection" that covers some of Python's special and built-in functions and methods. Everything in Python is an object, and Python's flexible and dynamic nature allows some interesting and creative techniques that may not be apparent to a casual observer. While I had certainly been exposed to everything in this chapter before, I have a much better insight into these kinds of techniques than I had before reading this book.

Mark Pilgrim is a master Python programmer. He has produced a work that is a very worthy tool for those who are serious about learning and using Python. True to his helpful style, he has made the book freely available on his web site, along with three other free, online books and numerous of his useful open source programs that have become popular standards in the Python community.