Cool stuff for Mac

Hey guys,

Recently, I got a Mac. This means I'll be able to help a lot more with Mac problems on our author forums and on this blog. In related news, here's a cool trick for Macs only. You can make your program talk to you! Start by importing os. OS is a module that lets you interact with your computer's operating system. Then, type the following:

os.system("say Hello World!")

This will send a command to Mac OS telling it to, well, say, "Hello World!" You can put whatever you want after say. However, apostrophes (') don't seem to work. If you have one in your string, it won't say anything at all. Here's an example program:

import os

os.system("say Whats your name?")
#For some reason, apostrophes don't work.

name = raw_input("What's your name?")
# It's good to put it on the screen as well,
# in case users don't have their speakers on.

print "Hi, "+name+", hows it going?"

os.system("say Hi, "+name+", hows it going?")

I hope this brings a whole new level of interaction to all your future programs!

Carter Sande

Carter Teaches Random

Dave Briccetti, who, among other things, teaches programming to kids, is teaching a Python class for Grade 7-9 students this summer at College for Kids. He asked if we would be interested in doing a "guest lecture" to his class. So Carter presented an introduction to randomness and the Python Random module. You can see the video on Dave's site, here:
http://young-programmers.blogspot.com/2010/06/randomness-in-python-lesson-by-carter.html

Carter's VPython Podcast

A couple of weeks ago, Carter did a podcast on VPython (Visual Python), a module to create 3D graphics. You can see it here:




For our next podcast, Carter will be answering questions from readers. So, please post any questions you have about Python or related modules in our Author Forum, at:
http://www.manning-sandbox.com/thread.jspa?threadID=38048&stqc=true


Warren and Carter

Passing arguments as a list

In the Author Forum on the Manning page for the book, someone asked about passing arguments to a function as a list. Since posting code on that forum doesn't work well, I thought I would post the answer here.

If you are passing a number of arguments to a function, you could pass them as individual arguments, like this:

def printMyLuckyNumbers(num1, num2, num3, num4, num5):
    print "Here are your lucky numbers:"
    print num1, num2, num3, num4, num5

Then you would call the function like this:

printMyLuckyNumbers(3, 7, 10, 14, 27)

But that has a couple of disadvantages. First, if there are a lot of arguments, it gets messy to type all the variable names. Second, you might not know ahead of time how many arguments you want to pass.

So, another way, that solves both those problems, is to pass a list of arguments instead, like this:

def printMyLuckyNumbers(myNums):
    print "Your lucky numbers are:"
    for num in myNums:
        print num,

Then you would call the function like this:

myLuckyNumbers = [3, 7, 10, 14, 27]
printMyLuckyNumbers(myLuckyNumbers)

In the first example, you are passing 5 separate arguments. In the second example, you are passing a single list. That list happens to have 5 items, in this example. But it would work with any number of items. For example, this would work just fine when calling the second version of the function:

myLuckyNums = [2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 27, 32, 45]
printMyLuckyNumbers(myLuckyNums)

These are very simple examples. You can pass things more complicated than lists. You can pass nested lists (lists of lists, or two-dimensional lists). You can pass objects, which can contain any data structure you care to define. You can pass lists of objects or objects containing lists (or dictionaries, or any other Python data type).

Hello World! on HanselMinutes

Carter and Warren recently appeared on the HanselMinutes podcast. Hanselminutes is a weekly audio show with web technology blogger Scott Hanselman.


You can find the podcast here.

Hello World! German Translation

We recently discovered that there is a German translation of "Hello World!" We found it on the amazon.co.uk site.




You can see some sample chapters here:

Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1

Oddly, our publisher, Manning, didn't tell us about the translation. We just stumbled across it ourselves. The publishing world sometimes works in strange and mysterious ways!