Educating the Open-source Community With Showmedo

Although as important as the software it supports, education and documentation are relatively neglected in the Open-source world. Coders love to code, and explaining how best to use or improve the software tends to be deferred or even sidelined.

At Showmedo we believe the community can play a vital role here and also say thanks for the tools and software that make our lives easier. If you have a piece of software you love or a programming langugage you are enthusiastic about, why not make a screencast showing others how to use it? All the stuff you wish you'd been told, the tips, tricks, insights that would have saved you time and frustration.

Screencasting is easier than you think, and we're happy to help you. You can email us for advice or just use some of the how-to screencasts on the site. This screencasting learning-path is a good place to start.

[091] Python 101 - easygui and csv (17 videos)

a series of video-tutorials by Ian Ozsvald

Aimed at Python Beginner Programmers, this fully-worked series builds a complete application that utilises a User Interface, the comma-separated-values (csv) module, reads and writes files, handles exceptions and gives useful error messages, uses test-driven development, nosetests and refactoring. We do all of this inside Wingware's excellent Wing IDE.

"Very well explained. I've learned a lot about debugging code. The ability to print the code, work through the problem and review the screencast, makes for clear understanding of what's going on. Thanks." - Jshack

"It's a NO BRAINER to get this quality of tutorial [...]. Everyone, who starts learning python, should get it. Excelent job. Keep up with a good work." - nicholas

Video Tutorials

[242] Series Overview in 5 minutes (Free)

We look over what is covered in the series and what you'll learn in the following 1 hour 20 minutes of tutorial screencasts.

43votes

48comments

[243] Introducing .csv files and the Wing IDE

The aim of this series is to build a working tool which reads a .csv file, creates averages, writes a new .csv file and does so with some nice user-interface controls. To begin we need to know about .csv files (csv at wikipedia) and we need to test our choice of IDE - Wing IDE.

44votes

16comments

[244] Batteries-included - the csv module

Python comes with its own comma-separated values (documentation) module - this is useful as there are many wrinkles with csv files that would make writing our own a pain (wikipedia: newline).

50votes

27comments

[245] Simple User Interfaces with easygui

easygui is a great module for building simple user-interfaces, created by Stephen Ferg, built on top of Tkinter. Here we learn how to create a file-open box in just 1 line of code, so we can easily open any .csv file.

59votes

29comments

[246] Debug Tip - Mising Import Statements

Do you know what happens if you mis-type an import statement? Learn about a common Python exception (and how to diagnose others) which will save you head-scratching time when you develop your own code.

33votes

10comments

[247] Exercise: User Interaction with a Yes/No control and the EnterBox

Want to question the user with a dialog? Want to ask for text input? Learn how to do both in this episode, this is a digression from the main theme aimed at teaching you more about easygui's wide selection of user-interface controls.

25votes

11comments

[248] Solution: The working Yes/No control and EnterBox

Here we have the working solution to the exercise from the previous episode. See my answer for talking to the user and writing some more logic.

22votes

13comments

[249] Refactoring with functions and doc strings

Refactoring code is the sensible way to make your programs more manageable. You need documentation to help explain the purpose of the code and to remind you how it works in the future.

31votes

19comments

[250] Starting with Unit-tests

Unit-tests are an invaluable development tool and should be a part of every developer's toolkit. Not only do they help us to test that our code works as expected, they also help us to write good code in the first place and point out errors that are introduced later in the development cycle.

26votes

14comments

[251] Exception handling and Unit-testing with justNumbers

Now we write unit-tests for our code using the powerful Test-Driven Development (TDD) approach. Using TDD we expand the new justNumbers function which means we need to look at exception handling to sensibly handle a ValueError exception.

20votes

12comments

[252] Completing getNumbers with Test Driven Development

We continue using the Test-Driven Development approach to write getNumbers and the associated test function. I give you the option of completing getNumbers yourself, ahead of my showing you how to write it, as an extra exercise for you.

18votes

4comments

[253] Error Handling to give user-feedback

User's need feedback when things don't go to plan. Learn how to develop code which gives useful error messages for the user and which exits gracefully (rather than crashing out with a horrible error).

10votes

6comments

[254] Averaging the data

To calculate an average we need to introduce a new 'average' function - you'll need to write a test for it. To call the function we need to have our numerical data stored in a list, so we introduce 'measured1' and show how to populate the list.

15votes

5comments

[255] Solution to the unit-test task for average

Adding the unit-test for our average function takes just a few lines of code, here you can see my solution to the task that I set in the previous episode. We also look at the addition of the 'measured2' list and associated code which will calculate the average for the 2nd column of data.

9votes

1comments

[256] easygui's choicebox for graphical list output

easygui has a nice component which lets us list items in a choicebox - this gives us a simple way of showing the contents of a list to the user. We can use this to output the 'measured1' list in graphical form.

11votes

4comments

[257] Writing the new .csv file with an average

Now we're in a position to write out a new .csv file (using the csv module) which can be read by Excel. We start with a simple .csv file which looks identical to the one we read in, then we add the new row for the averaged values.

19votes

8comments

[258] Presenting the finished product

Here we present the finished article. First we use argInitialFile = '*.csv' in the fileopenbox (and filesavebox) to filter just the .csv files. We also remove the 'print' statements that we used during development and end up with the finished tool.

25votes

25comments

CLUB SHOWMEDO

Are you learning Python? To keep the site running clean and ad-free we've started Club ShowMeDo. The club will allow you access to some special videos we're making to pass on programming skills we consider important to the development and enjoyment of Free Open Source Software (FOSS).

The focus at the moment is on developing with the Python programming language, one of the backbones of the FOSS movement with a huge number of included and third-party libraries.