Archive
Learn to program
A nice collection of links: Learn to Program.
YouTube video: here.
Cobol Tutorial
Just for fun: Cobol tutorial.
To be clear, I don’t ever want to touch Cobol. This is just for the record :)
Software Development Videos and Tutorials: Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, Agile, Software Testing
Marakana.com — open source training
“Marakana‘s raison d’être is to help people get better at what they do professionally. We accomplish this by organizing software training courses (both public and private) as well as publishing learning resources, sharing knowledge from industry leaders, providing a place to share useful tidbits and supporting the community. Our focus is open source software.”
Khan Academy
I just found the Khan Academy.
“The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We’re a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.
All of the site’s resources are available to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy’s materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.” (source)
Watch their intro on youtube.
They have lessons on computer science too.
[ via reddit ]
Hadoop
MapReduce and Hadoop have been on my list for some time. I hope I will have some time soon to look at them in detail. Until then, here are some nice tutorials:
Video lectures
“VideoLectures.NET is a free and open access educational video lectures repository. The lectures are given by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science. The portal is aimed at promoting science, exchanging ideas and fostering knowledge sharing by providing high quality didactic contents not only to the scientific community but also to the general public. All lectures, accompanying documents, information and links are systematically selected and classified through the editorial process taking into account also users’ comments.
Please check our Frequently asked Questions section and promotional video.” (source)
Some topics:
Python tutorials of Full Circle Magazine in a single PDF
Please read first the update information at the end of the post.
Description
Full Circle Magazine (FCM) started a Python tutorial series in issue #27. At the time of writing, the current issue is #45, and the tutorial is still there :)
Problem: it would be nice to extract these tutorials from the issues and put them together in a single PDF. Thus, we would have all the tutorials together in one document.
Download
For the lazy pigs, here is the PDF (6 MB). Get it while it’s hot :)
How to produce the single PDF
For those who are interested, here I explain how to produce the single PDF above.
First, download the issues of FCM. I suppose that the required files are named issue27_en.pdf, issue28_en.pdf, …, issue45_en.pdf. Put them in a directory called full-circle.
Here is a CSV file that contains data about which pages to extract from the issues:
# issue; start page; end page 27;7;10 28;7;11 29;7;11 30;7;9 31;8;11 32;8;12 33;8;12 34;8;15 35;10;13 36;7;11 37;7;11 38;7;11 39;7;11 40;8;14 41;8;12 42;8;11 43;7;9 44;7;9 45;7;8
Put this file (download link) to the same directory where the PDF files are. Here, create a subdirectory called pieces. The extracted PDFs will be stored there.
We will use the following Python script to produce the commands that will do the extraction:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# extract.py
f1 = open('python.csv', 'r')
for line in f1:
if line.startswith('#'):
continue
# else
line = line.rstrip('\n')
(issue, start_page, end_page) = line.split(';')
command = "pdftk issue%s_en.pdf cat %s-%s output pieces/%s-python.pdf" % (issue, start_page, end_page, issue)
print command
f1.close()
By executing the script (download link), you will get the following output:
pdftk issue27_en.pdf cat 7-10 output pieces/27-python.pdf pdftk issue28_en.pdf cat 7-11 output pieces/28-python.pdf pdftk issue29_en.pdf cat 7-11 output pieces/29-python.pdf pdftk issue30_en.pdf cat 7-9 output pieces/30-python.pdf pdftk issue31_en.pdf cat 8-11 output pieces/31-python.pdf pdftk issue32_en.pdf cat 8-12 output pieces/32-python.pdf pdftk issue33_en.pdf cat 8-12 output pieces/33-python.pdf pdftk issue34_en.pdf cat 8-15 output pieces/34-python.pdf pdftk issue35_en.pdf cat 10-13 output pieces/35-python.pdf pdftk issue36_en.pdf cat 7-11 output pieces/36-python.pdf pdftk issue37_en.pdf cat 7-11 output pieces/37-python.pdf pdftk issue38_en.pdf cat 7-11 output pieces/38-python.pdf pdftk issue39_en.pdf cat 7-11 output pieces/39-python.pdf pdftk issue40_en.pdf cat 8-14 output pieces/40-python.pdf pdftk issue41_en.pdf cat 8-12 output pieces/41-python.pdf pdftk issue42_en.pdf cat 8-11 output pieces/42-python.pdf pdftk issue43_en.pdf cat 7-9 output pieces/43-python.pdf pdftk issue44_en.pdf cat 7-9 output pieces/44-python.pdf pdftk issue45_en.pdf cat 7-8 output pieces/45-python.pdf
As can be seen, the extraction will be done with pdftk (more info here). Now, these commands are simply printed to the standard output. Here is how to execute them too:
./extract.py | sh
That is, pass the commands to the shell “sh”, which will execute them line by line.
Okay, now we have the pieces in the directory “pieces”. Enter the directory “pieces” and join the PDFs:
pdftk *.pdf cat output all.pdf
Known issue
Well, to tell the truth, this method will produce a huge single PDF. The extracted pieces are also very big (5 to 10 MB), and the final PDF is about 130 MB! So actually I used Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional to merge the pieces with the conversion setting “Smaller File Size”. Acrobat Pro optimized the files and produced a file of size 6 MB. If you know how to have a similar result with open source tools, let me know.
Update (20110305):
It seems FCM comes out with a similar idea: http://fullcirclemagazine.org/python-special-edition-1/. They collected the first 8 parts of the already published Python tutorials in a special edition.
Update (20110329):
I pushed this project to GitHub, see https://github.com/jabbalaci/Full-Circle-Magazine-Series. I added some changes but I won’t rewrite this post each time. For the latest version, please refer to GitHub.
[ @reddit ]
Learn GIMP with GIMPtricks
Would you like to learn to use a powerful image editor? Do you find Photoshop too expensive and too complicated? Are you looking for a free alternative? Then you should learn GIMP! If you don’t know how to get started, visit GIMPtricks’s channel at YouTube.
GIMPtrick is a Dutch girl who can explain everything about GIMP in a very clear and understandable way. If you’ve never used GIMP, start with her beginner tutorials.
