I am trying to build a web application that requires intensive mathematical calculations. Can I use Django to populate python charts and pandas dataframe?
You can use any framework to do so. If you worked with Python before I can recommend using Django since you have the same (clear Python) syntax along your project. This is good because you keep the same logic everywhere but should not be your major concern when it comes to choosing the right framework for your needs. So for example if you are a top Ruby-On-Rails developer I would not suggest to learn Django just because of Pandas.
In general: A lot of packages/libraries are written in other languages but you will still be able to use them in Django/Python. So for example the famous "Elasticsearch" Searchbackend has its roots in JAVA but is still used in a lot of Django apps.
But it also goes the other way around "Celery" is written in Python but can be used in Node.js or PHP. There are hundreds of examples but I think you get the Point.
I hope that I brought some light into the darkness. If you have questions please leave them in the comments.
I'm tasked with creating our Google Maps website store locator and so far all I've been able to find is old php tutorials and some new appEngine apps.
The apps look great. They seem to function as designed and it looks like this is the way I need to proceed. I even found a demos here and here and both are perfect.
Problem is, I'm not at the level yet to understand them in order to learn from them and start implementing my own app for our stores. I do plan on using them to learn, but at the moment I'm not at that level yet so I'm not even really learning anything by examining the code.
Is there anything I can use at the moment that is a plugin option while I learn this? Perhaps any python tutorials out there hiding somewhere? I can learn these demos but I really need something for the time being while I'm figuring it all out.
This demo from 2008 might be a bit old but will put you on the right tracks.
There is also locator in geodatastore. Demo
My goal is to write some sort of chatterbot that speaks in spanish. I've seen examples for simple python chatterbots, but their answers are mostly just random. I want the bot to partially understand the question and formulate a response to it, like http://cleverbot.com does. I'm guessing I would want to use python for this since I want it to be a web app. What's involved in making something like this? Are there any libraries that do this already?
Thanks in advance for any help.
For a starting place, I'd take a look at the Natural Language Toolkit: http://www.nltk.org/.
Spanish chatterbots are listed on:
http://www.chatbots.org/language/spanish/
There is a forum for beginners 'New to chatbot programming'
http://www.chatbots.org/ai_zone/viewforum/35/
And a document with the very first guidelines:
/ai_zone/viewthread/492/
And a support forum for a recent launched tool to build a chatbot your self, called ChatScript:
/ai_zone/viewforum/44/
As I new member, I'm only allowed to leave 2 hyperlinks, which I understand, but you probably know how to extend to the full URL :-)
I've been meaning to learn another language than java. So I started to poke around with python. I've gone over 'dive into python' so I have a decent knowledge about python now.
where do you suggest I go from here? I dont want to go through another advanced book again and would like to use the python knowledge towards building 'something'.
I've heard that python is good for web crawling, however, I did not see that in dive into python. Can the community suggest how to use my pythong knowledge towards web crawlers or spiders?
That really kind of depends on what you enjoy, or would like to build. Since you haven't said, I'll recommend something I enjoyed instead. Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran is a fun book, and the examples are all in Python. It might be more interesting to you -- if nothing else, it would give your web crawler something to do with the pages it gathers.
Edit: Fusspawn's suggestion of PyGame is very good, if don't want any more books and just want to "dive in" to something.
You can try my Building Skills in OO Design.
http://homepage.mac.com/s_lott/books/oodesign.html
If you like math try learning Python by solving Project Euler problems using python. Each problem is not too much code and it helped me increase my python skills.
I always find making a small game is a nice way to learn a language
PyGame makes it simple and could help learn more about python. I suggest giving it ago if your that way inclined.
To get started with web crawling, consider the Scrapy framework.
http://scrapy.org/
"Scrapy is a high level scraping and web crawling framework for writing spiders to crawl and parse web pages for all kinds of purposes, from information retrieval to monitoring or testing web sites."
It's still edging towards a first release, but is usable and has decent documentation.
For very basic web scraping, check out Mechanize (for basic web "browsing") and BeautifulSoup (for parsing "html soup"):
http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/
http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
One fun thing to do would be to combine these interests with some natural language processing projects. The NLTK book recently published by O'Reilly is available online as well:
http://www.nltk.org/book
Lots of fun to be had combining these interests. :-)
If you want to expand beyond web crawling and don't want to start a your own project (or don't know what to do), check out The Python Challenge. It's a game where you have to solve puzzles with a bit of python code. I really enjoyed it.
Is web crawling something you want to do or just something you think you can accomplish? Python is a good tool for web crawling(see here and here), but if you really just want ANY project to work on to get more familiar to the language/APIs I'd suggest you pick a project that you have a general interest in regardless. That way it'll be easier to stick with to fruition as you already have an interest in the project in addition to an interest in the language.
Find an interesting open source project to participate in. You could start looking on pythonsource or sourceforge.
The Tools/webchecker/ directory, which should be in your Python distribution (otherwise you can get it via the link I gave), is a start -- with lots of limitations (no threading except in wsgui.py, no async operation, ...), but removing some of them would be a great learning experience!
A vastly superior spidering system could be built on top of Twisted, e.g. starting with the snippet at the bottom of this mail (which only gets one page, but in the proper asynchronous way!) and adding the other functionality you see exemplified in webchecker (parse and respect robots.txt, get links from pages, etc, etc).
If you wanna "advanced book", I recommend Alex's Python in a Nutshell, Second Edition, learn quite a lot from the book, and Tarek's Expert Python Programming,we all know it's a advanced book for it's title:) .
For read some open source project, recommend SQLAlchemy and Django.
Maybe try to start you own project is the best way.
Others have said it but I'll repeat: work on something you are interested in or it won't be fun.
If you do decide that a crawler would be fun, take a look at google-kongulo, web spider plugin for Google desktop search. The code is quite short and well-written, so this might make a good base for when you decide what you want to crawl.
If you're specifically interested in crawling the Web, check out the three-part talk called "Scrape the Web" given at PyCon 2009. It's part of this RSS feed.
Read Dive Into Python again, it discusses HTML processing and HTTP web services in chapters 8 and 11.
I'm wondering how the best way to build a way to interface with Yahoo Chat is. I haven't found anything that looks incredibly easy to do yet. One thought it to build it all from scratch, the other thought would be to grab the code from open source software. I could use something like zinc, however, this maybe more complex than it needs to be. Another option would be to find a library that supports it, however, I haven't seen one. What are your thoughts on how to proceed and what would be the best way? I'm not necessarily looking for the fastest way as this is a bit of a learning project for me.
Python-purple is a python API for accessing libpurple, the Pidgin backend. It will give you access to all the IM networks which Pidgin supports, including Y!Messenger, MSN Messenger, Jabber/GTalk/XMPP, and more...