I have never gotten very good at any of the popular shell scripting languages. Over the years, I’ve dabbled in Bourne sh scripts, Perl, awk, and sed. I was never one of those magical guys who could make anything happen in a few seconds. But I’ve always wanted that to change.<\/p>\n
\nI’ve decided to learn Python. I want a fast-acting Swiss Army Knife at my disposal for splicing together the loose ends of my computer life.\n<\/p>\n
\nWhy Python? I don’t know it well enough to really sing its praises, but a number of influences caused me to veer towards this language (as opposed to say, improving my Perl or picking up Ruby):\n<\/p>\n
\nI have a little trick with these “short chapters” tutorials. I keep a bookmark to the “next chapter” in my Safari bookmarks bar, and add reading it to my ToDo list for the following day. When I finish the chapter, I update the toolbar bookmark and wait until the next day. That way the learning is never overwhelming – just a few minutes aday, and it still only takes me a couple weeks to get through the whole tutorial.\n<\/p>\n
\nThis trick is OK, but while I was taking this tutorial, I got annoyed by having to constantly flash back and forth between the web page and my Terminal window. The Python tutorial introduces you to ideas that, if you’re anything like me, you immediately want to try out in the interactive shell. I decided to take a cue from Michael McCracken, who recently produced and distributed a dumbed down web browser just for reading Gmail<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n \nLearn Python<\/a> is a simple Mac OS X application (GNU License, source included) that puts a web browser and terminal window into one application. The web browser points at the aforementioned Python tutorial on the web, and it remembers the last URL you went to, so you can trust it to remember which chapter you were at when you last quit.\n<\/p>\n \nIt’s a Python-Tutorial Browsing Machine!\n<\/p>\n \nBy almost every possible measurement, this project was a “waste of time.” But sometimes you’ve got to make the software you wish existed, just so you know it does. I rationalize the time as well-spent since it sets me up to easily crank out one-offs of a similar vein as I find a use for them. If I was really bored I would probably have added “value added” buttons to the UI for specifically navigating the document structure (e.g. next chapter, etc). But I think I’m done for now. Hopefully most of the bugs are ironed out.\n<\/p>\n \nI hope some of you will get some use out of this extremely narrow piece of work. At least it might encourage you to learn Python!\n<\/p>\n \nPS:<\/strong> Unhappy with the default version of Python that gets launched? Or wish you could use the tool as a ruby or shell scripting or whatever tool? I haven’t put any preferences in this application, but it would be easy enough to hack the sources. If you aren’t feeling up to hacking the sources, or don’t have the tools handy, you can specifically override the path of the launched tool by editing the file “Localizable.strings” in “Learn Python.app\/Contents\/Resources\/English.lproj\/”. Inside this file, change the line:<\/p>\n That will tell the application to use zsh instead of python. Replace the “\/bin\/zsh” with whatever you want.\n<\/p>\n \nUpdate<\/strong> (June 3, 2006): The download has been updated to version 1.0.3<\/a>, which now defaults to a left-right orientation for the web and python shell panes. The setting can be changed back to top-bottom through the preferences dialog.<\/p>\n\r\n\"\/usr\/bin\/python\" = \"\/usr\/bin\/python\";\r\n<\/pre>\n