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Welcome to issue 23 of Python Weekly. What would you like Guido van Rossum to talk about at PyCon? Let Guido know about it here
 
Articles, Tutorials and Talks

A recent discussion on the python-ideas mailing list made it clear that we (i.e. the core Python developers) need to provide some clearer guidance on how to handle text processing tasks that trigger exceptions by default in Python 3, but were previously swept under the rug by Python 2's blithe assumption that all files are encoded in "latin-1". This is a preliminary guide at summarising the options for processing text files, and the various trade-offs between them.
 
When you need raw speed for computationally expensive procedures, nothing beats getting closer to the metal. The results in this post shows 8x speedup by implementing django view in the C++.
 
What is inside the Cubes Python OLAP Framework? Here is a brief overview of the core modules, their purpose and functionality.
 
There are currently quite a few different ways of developing a web application in python.  When you add in how you deploy the application as well, there are even more choices. This post shows the results of a fairly simple benchmark; implemented across the different application styles. 
 
The author shares his experience with using python-requests library for serializing and saving Session objects for later.
 
These quickstarts are short simple tutorials intended to help you get started using Twilio's Voice, Client, SMS and Connect APIs.
 
This post shows how to get the output of "git log" in an easy to parse format and build a python dict from the result. You could then convert the dict to JSON, XML, HTML, etc.
 
In this post you will learn how to create a Python script for use in Blender's game engine.


Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

Toto is a small framework intended to accelerate API server development. It is built on top of Tornado and can currently use either MySQL or MongoDB as a backing database.
 
This is a port of the excellent django-debug-toolbar for Flask applications.
 
Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any ereader within minutes. Booktype is built using Django.
 
CrypTweet is a collection of Python programs designed to work together, using RSA public-key cryptography so that anyone can send you an encrypted direct message, but only you can read it.
 
It is a django app that allows you to capture application metrics by each user individually.  You can generate reports with aggregation of results by day or by week for each user.
 
Mock is a library for testing in Python. It allows you to replace parts of your system under test with mock objects and make assertions about how they have been used.
 
Logan is a toolkit for running standalone Django applications. It provides you with tools to create a CLI runner, manage settings, and the ability to bootstrap the process.

Django Knowledge makes it easy to add an integrated support desk, help desk or knowledge base to your Django project with only a few lines of boilerplate code.
 

New Releases

Django 1.4 beta includes various new features and some minor backwards incompatible changes. There are also some features that have been dropped, which are detailed in the deprecation plan, and we've begun the deprecation process for some features.
 

Upcoming Events and Webinars
 

Allan Beaufour will present how Chartbeat uses Django to power chartbeat.com and run through specific modules/tricks in use. He will also do a general description of the Chartbeat infrastructure and talk about how Puppet is used to maintain, not just the web servers, but the general infrastructure.
 
Join your fellow Python developers for an all day event hosted by Spire.io. We'll be going through an introduction of classes, iterators, control statements and python data structures (dictionaries and lists and tuples). This is a great workshop for folks who have been to one of our beginner workshops and is ready to take the next steps!


Books

Hello! Python fully covers the building blocks of Python programming and gives you a gentle introduction to more advanced topics such as object-oriented programming, functional programming, network programming, and program design. New (or nearly new) programmers will learn most of what they need to know to start using Python immediately.

 
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