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Thank you
Suhail

To tell about python editor’s there are many editors available for python, like activetstate’s komodo, python wingware, Stani’s etc. The choice of text editor to choose depends upon you, the operating system you use, the number of features your require from your text editor, etc. Here I am writing my own list of text editors, that i have used. Theres also this good little article i found on about.com on “Choosing a Text Editor for Python Programming” http://python.about.com/od/gettingstarted/ss/text_editors.htm.

Geany: Geany is that little editor, i keep at hand for any purpose, whether i wanna write an article or do some coding stuff, i prefer to use geany most of the time, its simple and lightweight, to be honest, the main thing i started using geany is, it opens with all pages and tabs from where you had left, if you have shut down your computer and when you come back and start your computer, you start geany, and it will open up with all the tabs that you had left open to work upon. i couldn’t find this feature in any other editors i have used so far. And it also has lots of other features, to view the different features of Geany, you can visit this link Here.

Vim: vim for sysadmins they call it as vi, this is also one powerful editor, its a unix editor, it also has this plugin feature, you can configure to act as a python editor, and being a unix editor, comparatively its the most light-weight and has a lot of features that can configured as required. And if you want to get a good hands on vim and want to have a good knowledge about the editor, i suggest you read swaroopch’s “A Byte of Vim”, you will learn about the different features of vim and how it can be used and also how you can configure vim to be the editor of your choice. And you can also visit this link http://0xbabaf000l.blogspot.com/ it has lot of comic strips about vim, gnu and other stuff.

gedit: its the is the official text editor of the GNOME desktop environment. sure it is again a light-weight editor but, i won’t call it powerful and neither it has that many features, all i would say its a simple little editor that can get your work done, it sure has the plugins feature, for a list of its features visit the Gedits official website page here: http://projects.gnome.org/gedit/index.html

ActiveState Komodo Edit: Now here we come to the hard core editor, Komodo Edit supports PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and Tcl, plus JavaScript, CSS, HTML and template languages like RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Smarty and Django. This is again one of my favorite editors after Geany, its not light-weight as the other editors i have mentioned till now, you can’t expect it to be a light-weight, as it has lots of features, Multi-language support, Project management, toolbox, Extensions, plugins, code snippets, html preview, etc. read the complete list of features here: http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/features/
And its available for linux as well as windows and Mac.

These are some of the editors that i have used so far for coding in python, these editors are free, there are other editors too like Stani’s python editor, pydev, Boa constructor, bluefish (never tried those) but i will still stick to Geany, as i have got used to it, and it has that one feature that i always wanted, of opening up with all the tabs from where you had left.

posting after a long time, its been over 2 months since the last post. can’t help it, that’s the life of a sysadmin. ok, moving on to this post, as i have decided that i would be writing on mostly python, as that has become my favourite programming language. now after a long break, continuing back on my learning python journey, I have picked up this Book: Python for Unix and Linux system administration By Noah Gift and Jeremy Jones. I have still not completed the book, just reached the 4th chapter, but I am seriously liking it, After recommending Magnus Lie Hetland’s “Beginning python from novice to professional”, this is one another book that i would recommend for beginners as well as for any person wanting to learn python, its very well and clearly explained, and the one good thing, i liked is, lot of practical examples.

Please don’t be bored, To start with, Authors Acknowledgement, Yes!, I am mentioning this part, it might sound boring, why need to start with Acknowlegdement, If you look at Noah’s acknowledgement, its a very very long Thank’s giving list, But!, I liked it, that was something really humble, he has thanked each and every freind and mentor he has met, even his teachers at school, its really quite interesting.

Moving onto the next best part Chapter 1, “Introduction”, the question, Why Python?, I clearly agree to what the Author’s have explained about why to use python. Some reasons from the book that i would mention, Yes, Python is easy to learn. If a language can’t help you become productive pretty quickly, the lure of that language is severely diminished. Why would you want to spend weeks or months studying a language before you are able to write a program that does something useful? This is especially the case for sysadmins. If you can’t learn a language quickly enough to start writing scripts with it almost immediately, you should strongly question whether you should be learning it. However, a language that is easy to learn but doesn’t allow you to do fairly complex tasks isn’t worth much either. So the second reason to consider Python to be an
excellent programming language is that, while it lets you start simply, it also allows you to perform tasks that are as complex as you can imagine.

In this introduction part they have also taken some little examples and compared doing the same task in python and then doing the same thing in Perl and Bash and the difference between them. And there’s this little article called “Motivation”, this is a really good little article for people who are new to programming and are learning programming for the first time.

Then they move on to “The Basics”, here you will get to know about ipython, its features, benefits and how to use it, even i never knew there was something like ipython and really useful. along with ipython the chapter takes you further on functions in python and import statements in python and other basics.



Moving on to Chapter 2, It is all about Ipython, ipython is a python shell, and it has lot more features than the standard python shell, In this chapter, you will get to know, its features, how to install it, how to use it, how to use the import functions, configuring it, using the Magic functions of ipython.

Chapter 3, “Text”, yes, this chapter is about string and text processing, Python’s Built-ins and modules, Unicode srings, regular expressions, working with files, ElementTree.

Chapter 4, “Documentation and Reporting”, this chapter is about gathering, formatting and prcessing data. you’ll learn about Automated Information Gathering, sending and receiving emails, Information Formatting, generating graphs, PDFs and csv excel files.

Chapter 5, “Networking”, this chapter is about creating sockets, testing the connections, protocols: http, ftp, RPC, ssh, Pyro framework, Twisted the network framework, Scapy.

Chapter 6, “Data”, This chapter is about moving of data from one location to another, sysadmins do these sruff using tools like scp, cp, mv or rsync, in this chapter you will learn about doing these tasks by scripting in python and also doing some more useful stuff. working with paths, directories, files, comparing the data, archiving, compressing and restoring the data.

Chapter 7, “SNMP”, this chapter covers the aspects of SNMP: autodiscovery, polling/monitoring, writing agents, device control, and finally enterprise SNMP integration. all of these things are going to be done with Python.
SNMP installation and configuration, IPython and Net-SNMP, Discovering a Data Center, Creating Hybrid SNMP Tools.

Chapter 8, “OS Soup”, this chpater is about using python across different OS distributions, From Linux, to Solaris, to OS X, to FreeBSD, it needs to be in your toolbelt. here you’ll learn Cross-Platform Unix Programming in Python, Creating a Cross-Platform, Systems Management Tool, Creating a Cross-Platform Build Network, Amazon Web Services with Boto, Google App Engine.

Chapter 9, “Package Management”, this chapter is about packaging and managing Python code and your Python environment. Setuptools and Python Eggs, easy_install, Authenticating to a Password Protected Site, Using Configuration Files, Creating Eggs and lots more.

Chapter 10, “Processes and Concurrency”, this chapter is about processes, using the subprocess module, its features, threads, creating and managing threads, scheduling the process.

Chapter 11, “Building GUIs”, this chapter is about PyGTK, curses, and the Django web framework. Building a Simple PyGTK App, Building an Apache Log Viewer Using PyGTK, Building an Apache Log Viewer Using Curses. After the GUI part come the Web applications part, its taking your python applications to web, for me this was the part i needed, because as a sysadmin i nevert make or was never required to make GUI tools. using the Django framework.

Chapter 12, “Data Persistence”, this chapter is about storing the data for its later use, Simple Serialization, Pickle, Cpickle, shelve, YAML, ZODB, Relational Serialization, SQLAlchemy ORM.

Chapter 13, “Command Line”, this chapter is on creating command line tools, Integrating Shell Commands into Python
Command-Line Tools, Integrating Configuration Files.

Chapter 14, “Pragmatic Examples”, In this final chapter you’ll learn, Managing DNS with Python, Using LDAP with OpenLDAP, Active Directory, and More with Python.

This was just a little overview and my personal review about the book, as i liked it, and personally i would recommend this book to any guy wanting to learn programming, especially as the name of the book specifies its book for the sysadmins, yes, its one great book for the sysadmins. the explanations have been made very clear. If there are any corrections or suggestions or feedback, Please feel free to comment, Also if there are any books related to python, that you may have read, i would be happy if you could share your views with us. you can also mailme at: activespark.info{AT}gmail{DOT}com.

Django is a web framework built in python, it enables you to build clean, feature-rich application in less amount of time.

Web development has made a lot of progress during the last few years. It began as a tedious task that involved CGI interfacing external programs with the web server. CGI applications used the standard I/O facilities available to the C programming language in order to get user input and produce the required page output. In addition to being difficult to work with, CGI required a seperate copy of the program to be launched for each requests , which quickly overloaded the servers.

Then, new scripting languages were introduced to the web development, and this inspired developers tocreate more efficient technologies. Languages such as Perl and PHP quickly made their way into the world of web development, and as a result common web tasks such as cooking handing, session management and text processing became easier. Although these scripting languages had the libraries, to deal with the day to day web tasks, they lacked unified frameworks, as libraries were fundamentally different in design, usage and conventions. Therefore, the need for cohesive frameworks arose.

Few Years Ago, The MVC (Model View Controller) was introduced to the world of web development for building of web based applications. This software engineering pattern seperates data(Model), user interface(View), and data handling logic(Controller), so that one can be changed without affecting the other. The Benefits are that designers can work on the interface without worrying about data storage and Management. And Developers can think and code on the logic of Data Handling without worrying about the presentation.

Now how does Python come into play ? Although python is used for build wide variety of applications, it is also very suited for web applications. It has a clean and elegant syntax and is supported by large library of modules which covers everything , from multi-threading to the zipping of files. Python laguage’s Object Oriented model is very well suited for the MVC style of web development.

As you can see performance is a very big concern with many of the web projects and it will always be with any of the new coming web projects. And in such situations, Python’s runtime environment does a very good job. as it is known to be fats and stable. Python supports wide range of web servers which include famous names like Apache, nginx, IIS, lighttpd, etc. Python also supports a wide range of Database servers, whch also includes some famous names like MySQL, PostGreSQL, etc. And if you are using Django framework, you don’t need to deal with the databases directly, Django provides a unified layer of access to all database engines.

Advantages of Python :-

1) Clean and elegant syntax.

2) Large standard library of modules that covers a wide range of tasks.

3) Extensive documentation.

4) Mature runtime environment.

5) Support for standard and proven technologies such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and also other famousweb servers and database servers.

Django ?

There are so many frameworks in python such as cherrypy, web.py, Albatross, Quixote, Spyce, Webware, pylons, grok, zope, turbogears, so, what sets Django apart from these ?

Tight integration between components:- Django provides a set of tightly integrated components; all of these components have been developed by the Django team themselves. Django’s components were designed for integration, reusability and speed from the start.

Object-Relational Mapper:- Django’s database component, the Object-Relational Mapper (ORM), provides a bridge between the data model and the database engine. It supports a large set of database systems, and switching from one engine to another is a matter of changing a configuration file. This gives the developer great flexibility if a decision is made to change from one database engine to another.

Clean URL Design:- The URL system in Django is very flexible and powerful; it lets you define patterns for the URLs in your application, and define Python functions to handle each pattern. This enables developers to create URLs that are both user and search engine friendly.

Automatic Administration Interface:- Django comes with an administration interface that is ready to be used. This interface makes the management of your application’s data a breeze. It is also highly flexible and customizable.

Advanced Development Environment:- Django provides a very nice development environment. It comes with a lightweight web server for development and testing. When the debugging mode is enabled, Django provides very thorough and detailed error messages with a lot of debugging information. All of this makes isolating and fixing bugs very easy.

Multi-Lingual Support:- Django supports multi-lingual websites through its built-in internationalization system. This can be very valuable for those working on websites with more than one language. The system makes translating the interface a very simple task.