Friday, December 21, 2007

The AWK Programming Language

On Raymond Hettinger's advice I picked up a copy of "The AWK Programming Language." At 200 pages it makes "The C Programming Language" look like a door stop by comparison. I'm told Chapter 2 is especially good. Chapter 2 is 50 pages out of that 200.

Up til now I've been modeling my writing on Stevens and specifically "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment." That book truly is a door stop and I've consulted it too many times to count. Need to write a quick and dirty TCP/IP server? It's in there. Can't remember how to properly fork a daemon? It's in there (don't forget to fork twice!) It is an incredible achievement for a computer book to still be useful over 15 years after it was published.

Raymond also says he has checked in a bunch of optimizations. I'll have to 'svn up' and maybe write about them here (I say that just to increase the likelihood of doing it).

Friday, December 7, 2007

Python stuff goes here

The python section of my main blog (over here) was dying from neglect so I'm starting one here. I won't be porting the old content because there wasn't much of it and it was time based besides (updates from PyCon, etc).

My Python TODO list is relatively unchanged:
* Book
* Rewrite the probstat extension
(permutation/combination/cartesian of iterables)
* Get active in python development again

I didn't put in a talk proposal for PyCon but I will be there. I will be preparing a couple lightning talks to test out ideas for full talks for PyCon 2009.