The Beginning Programmers Workshop will be held as a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session at [http://ohiolinux.org/ Ohio LinuxFest 2008]. Hopefully it will inspire similar workshops elsewhere.
The idea is simply to bring new programmers, and programmers new to Python, together with experienced ones to take their first steps in Python in an environment with plenty of help to get them over the hump.
Project suggestions for attendees
- Walk through a general Python tutorial
[http://docs.python.org/tutorial/ Python Tutorial]
[http://www.byteofpy.org/ A Byte of Python]
[http://diveintopython.org/ Dive Into Python]
- Use /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/*/temperature and [http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/ matplotlib] to chart your computer's CPU temperature
- Use [http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ Beautiful Soup] to extract a shopping list for a recipe from [http://www.opensourcefood.com/ Open Source Food]
- Write a game with [http://www.pyglet.org/ pyglet]
- Use [http://www.vpython.org/vPython Visual Python] to play with the solar system demo or for another 3-D graphics project
- Walk through the [http://www.sqlalchemy.org/docs/05/ormtutorial.html SQLAlchemy Tutorial] to get data into and out of a relational database
- Create a dynamic web application. Possible platforms to build it on include
[http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/ web2py]
[http://djangoproject.com/ Django]
[http://code.google.com/appengine/ Google App Engine]
- Do something that's actually useful *to you* 