Teaching IronPython: D520 weeks 4 & 5
Tony Andrew Meyer is teaching IronPython as course D520 ("Programming") at Northtec, using IronPython in Action as course material. He has been posting weekly updates of his progress including making his course notes available for download.
We've covered his previous entries:
Tony has now posted two more entries, on weeks four and five of the course.
We've covered his previous entries:
Tony has now posted two more entries, on weeks four and five of the course.
We basically did two things: worked through the MultiDoc example in Chapter 4, and worked on implementing the Airline lab designed in the previous week.
The first recommended reading for the week was Part 1 of Joel Spolsky’s “Talk at Yale”, wherein he tries to relate his study to his career – the part I hoped they would find interesting was the discussion of “geeks” versus “suits”. The second recommended article was Steve Yegge’s “Code’s Worst Enemy”, which is mostly about code bloat. In retrospect, these might not be the best pairing, since Yegge is always long, and this particular Spolsky article is very long (if you read all three parts). However, I was again pleasantly surprised to hear that students were actually reading these.
I was right to set aside a whole ‘lecture’ section of a week for introducing MultiDoc – I used all two hours (with breaks and a late start, actually about 90 minutes) going over the code, and didn’t quite manage to finish – I got up to the very last section, but didn’t have time to go through adding the menubar/menu items (so I did that in the break and showed the working example afterwards).
Chapter 5 of IronPython in Action deals with XML, although it starts out covering some of the more advanced things you can do with functions. I considered skipping this chapter (the function material is perhaps a bit advanced, and covering XML isn’t a necessity), but decided that it was worth learning about XML in .NET (since it’s so common) and that it would make using the MultiDoc example tricky (since the file format is XML) and I really wanted to use MultiDoc. I gave the students notes [PDF], again covering the textbook material that we could look at, the tools (unchanged), key points, and a link to the MultiDoc example code. [...]
I got the feeling that the material on functions was a little advanced, as I suspected. This was, however, the ideal place for me to cover lambdas, as I proposed doing last week, so I added that in. I talked about functions defined in other functions, passing functions as arguments, anonymous functions (lambdas), and decorators. These are important things to learn if you’re going to be a Python developer (or a developer in other languages that let you treat functions in this way), but perhaps belong in a more advanced class. Next year I might skip over this (i.e. assign it as recommended reading), and just rewrite any of the textbook examples to use regular functions. On the other hand, it’s great exam question material!
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