Been learning Python, what new skill have you been learning?

[Nuke]

Lately I have been learning Python, as I really want to move my career to web development (been planning it for some time). I am finding it uber fun and a great language to learn. I found a good free ebook online (dive into Python)  and I also been following video tutorials on Youtube by Google and some other online tutorials.

Seems pretty awesome as a web language also, but having to change the way I think about coding into a more OOP style, where as before I have always just done C and lower level stuff.

Just wanted to ask what new skills and stuff you guys are learning as I find it interesting :)

[dcx2]

My expertise in designing PCBs continues to grow.

I learned that round pads for SMT chips are better than rectangular pads, because lead free solder has a higher melting temperature, and the corners of the rectangular pads heat up faster, and then their flux burns away, which leads to poor wetting, and makes tombstoning chips a bigger problem.

I also learned about heel, toe, and side fillets on solder joints.  One of my footprints was a little bit too wide for the TSSOP that I was putting in, and it lead to some weak heel joints.  Boo.  That's when I learned Altium has an IPC footprint generator....it's awesome.

I looked at Python a bit once.  It's *wildly* different from anything I've ever done.  Multiple flavors of ASM, including one for a CPU that I built in VHDL, C, C++, C#, Java, Java code that writes HTML code...despite knowing all that, Python is just really, really strange.

I would have to say C# is my favorite high level language to write.  Mostly because Visual Studio is an awesome IDE, but also because it's a pretty mature language with some great documentation on MSDN.

[James0x57]

Python is very cool! I studied it for a project in college and wrote a couple of demo things. It was fun but I never stuck with it.

Do you have any web projects in mind for your motivation, Nuke? =D
( beyond the usual resume site ;p )



I don't know that my hobbies will ever go to PCBs. I mean, I am definitely interested in them and I loved digital electronics class. ..but I think I much prefer the convenience of software. (So my problem is that I'm lazy? lol)
Same question to you too, dcx2, do you have any specific projects in mind for your endeavor? =D





I've been learning Regular Expressions recently and I feel very confident with them now.
3 months ago I wouldn't have been able to look at one and know anything about it. (though I used some basic ones for developing the database- I found them through google)

Just for fun I started rewriting the database code page parser (code txt file --> html formatting) using just regular expressions. Right now it's ~3x faster and 2% the amount of code! (but it isn't yet marking up notes or paying attention to 'pages', so this isn't live yet)

[dcx2]

I do PCB stuff for my employer...so I can't really talk about the projects.

As far as regex, Gecko.NET has a regex search function for disassembly.  It's quite useful for finding things.

[Codyk]

ahh next year in high school im taking simple programming and java programming and for college im going into web server designing and thats not very far away schools in the third quarter : P. after next year im going to adventure my way into c++ to learn it fully 

[Nuke]

My expertise in designing PCBs continues to grow.

I learned that round pads for SMT chips are better than rectangular pads, because lead free solder has a higher melting temperature, and the corners of the rectangular pads heat up faster, and then their flux burns away, which leads to poor wetting, and makes tombstoning chips a bigger problem.

I also learned about heel, toe, and side fillets on solder joints.  One of my footprints was a little bit too wide for the TSSOP that I was putting in, and it lead to some weak heel joints.  Boo.  That's when I learned Altium has an IPC footprint generator....it's awesome.

I looked at Python a bit once.  It's *wildly* different from anything I've ever done.  Multiple flavors of ASM, including one for a CPU that I built in VHDL, C, C++, C#, Java, Java code that writes HTML code...despite knowing all that, Python is just really, really strange.

I would have to say C# is my favorite high level language to write.  Mostly because Visual Studio is an awesome IDE, but also because it's a pretty mature language with some great documentation on MSDN.

That is cool, I also use Altium Designer and find it nice to work with.

What I like about C# is the GUI building is really easy, so for writing larger tools I don't think anything can beat it. The fact you can easily wrap DLL's is cool also.

[Nuke]

Python is very cool! I studied it for a project in college and wrote a couple of demo things. It was fun but I never stuck with it.

Do you have any web projects in mind for your motivation, Nuke? =D
( beyond the usual resume site ;p )

Hell yeah! :)

[James0x57]

@Nuke:
Ooo, now I'm really curious! lol
Is it relevant to Wii hacking at all or is it something unrelated that you're interested in? ^__^

[Nuke]

James,

Don't think so, but I just bought the wiidev.com domain so I may do something with that.

[James0x57]

lol Sweet. I'll be more than happy to link up GeckoCodes once you're up and ready.

[Codyk]

we had career day at school the other day. I am taking the programming and computer simulating class as I said. But I just found out what exactly their gonna teach me in this two year class lol. On my paper it said i will be learning visual basic.net, C#, and Java those are the languages ill be taught : P. also with the class i get college credits while I'm in high school and i get all the expensive software free or very cheap instead of it being $800 I would either get that program free or it would be around $30.

[Nuke]

we had career day at school the other day. I am taking the programming and computer simulating class as I said. But I just found out what exactly their gonna teach me in this two year class lol. On my paper it said i will be learning visual basic.net, C#, and Java those are the languages ill be taught : P. also with the class i get college credits while I'm in high school and i get all the expensive software free or very cheap instead of it being $800 I would either get that program free or it would be around $30.

You can get Express editions of C# and Visual Basic from http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/ and they are free to for life, you just have to activate the software which takes a couple of minutes. I don't think you get a debugger with Express versions, but you will never use that anyway and it is good practice to never use a debugger it will make you much better programmer. :)

[Codyk]

well its a two year class : P so after that ill have 8 college credits

[dcx2]

You can get Express editions of C# and Visual Basic from http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/ and they are free to for life, you just have to activate the software which takes a couple of minutes. I don't think you get a debugger with Express versions, but you will never use that anyway and it is good practice to never use a debugger it will make you much better programmer. :)

You do get a debugger with Visual Studio Express.  In fact, the Express edition even supports Edit and Continue, which is an awesome feature.  You can edit your code during a breakpoint, and it will recompile and continue execution without having to restart.

There are a few things neutered, though.  You do lose some breakpoint abilities, for instance you can't set data breakpoints, but data breakpoints are useless with a garbage collected language like C#.

Most importantly, you still get the Designer View, so you can see the layout of the form at design time.  IMO, Designer View is what makes Visual Studio better than any other IDE.

FYI, Gecko.NET was developed 100% using the free edition of Visual Studio Express C#.