Python-digest # 20. News, interesting projects, articles and interviews [March 23, 2014 - March 30, 2014]

The next news release about python and nearby technologies, albeit one day late, arrived. Today about REST, performance testing, machine learning, __del__ internals and many more interesting things.

Traditionally I thank owlman75 for the illustration, those who send news to create digests, and also periodically send me bug reports through Orfus

news

• Kickstarter project to translate the book 'Writing Idiomatic Python' into a series of screencasts
  The author of the book 'Writing Idiomatic Python' wants to make some videos where, step by step, bad code becomes good. Project goal: $ 5,000. If you manage to collect $ 10,000, then all the videos will be distributed under Creative Commons

Articles and interviews

• Task Queues
  Design problems of modern task queuing mechanisms (Celery) are considered. You should also carefully read the comments - they are also extremely useful.
• Tools for the statistical analysis of natural language
  A little theory and practice of statistical analysis of texts
• Displaying data on maps.
  Example of using mpl_toolkits in IPython notebook
• How to import without problems
  The author voices the solution to the problem of importing into different projects of a common code without putting them into system-wide libraries. The solution is imperfect and, if possible, you should still deal with the import system, for example, on an article on the Habr
• Counting ad infinitum and other tricks with __del__
  The author explores interesting features of the behavior of the garbage collector and the magic function __del__
• Fixtures for sessions in pytest
  A practical guide on how to prepare the data available during the entire testing session, and not in a separate test
• Real-time notifications on Django using node.js, socket.io, and Redis
  An interesting article showing how to stack versatile applications on a stack to achieve better performance and responsiveness of the client side.
• Competitive programming
  Another example of using the Threading module with illustration
• Testing the performance of your REST API in 15 minutes
  
• Industrial Machine Learning with Feature Forge
  Introduction to the FeatureForge Library (binding over scikit-learn)
• Installing packages A
  quick guide to setuptools, easy_install and pip
• Downloading directly to the S3 cloud
  A rather verbose article with all the subtleties on how to configure and implement the file upload form to Amazon S3 cloud storage
• Python
  surprises Some things in modules and the python language that seemed unusual or unexpected to the author
• Finding Similar Elements Using Machine Learning
  A series of articles on the subject with theory and practical examples. The first part was introductory, but also quite noteworthy
• Performance Analysis Guide This
  article, although not new, is very useful.
• Excel style interactive data grid for IPython notebook
  
• Unit Testing Basics
  A large and graphic-rich article on using the unittest module
• Django, Flask and Redis - we organize common user sessions for frameworks
  A detailed article describing the mechanisms for storing sessions in both frameworks and a solution for exchanging data between them
• AI algorithm for the game 2048
  
• Django REST framework overview.
  The main features are considered and due criticism is expressed.
• Creating XML with lxml.objectify
  

Video

• Python Meetup: February Meeting
  Four great reports from the February meeting of python developers

Books and documentation

• Over 80 of the best manuals, books and PDFs for teaching online programming.
  A selection of English-language (free) books, blogs, websites, and Python tutorials.

Interesting projects, tools, libraries

• pprintpp
  Even more beautiful pprint
• Punchcard - github style
  diagrams Build github style diagrams with the pycairo module