Entry Questionnaire --- Programming in Python  Fall 2010

33 responses (everyone enrolled in the course)

Reasons for taking this course (circle as many as you wish, or none):

 use in present job
 25

 prepare for future jobs
 25

 personal use
 25

 other (write details if you wish)


Programming experience (circle as many as apply):

 None   Courses   Personal   Professional
    2        20         18             18

Python experience (circle one):

 None   Beginner   Intermediate   Expert
    8         22             5   

Other programming languages (write down as many as you wish, or None):

C       13  
Java     9
C++      8
Perl     8
PHP      6
VB/VBA   6
Javascript 5
C#       3
Fortran  3
Tcl      3
SQL      3
Lisp/Scheme 2
Ruby     1
Objective C 1
Other   10 (Ada, Pascal, XSLT, Forth, MATLAB, Mathematica, R, Groovy, HTML, assemblers, shells)
 
Operating systems (circle as many as you wish):

 Windows  Mac  Linux  Other (Sun,etc.)   None
      25   16     20      2

Text editors/IDEs/programming environments (as many as you wish, or None):

vi/vim etc.  13
Eclipse       9
Notepad etc.  8
IDLE          7
Visual Studio 6
emacs         2
Other        13 (Gedit, Textmate, Textpad, BBEdit, PythonWin, ...)
None          1

Version control systems (as many as you wish, or None)

None   15
svn     9
cvs     7
git     2
source safe 2
Synergy 1 
RCS     1
Clearcase 1

Unit test frameworks (as many as you wish, or None)

None   20
JUnit   2
Eclipse 2
Others  8 (just one user each)

*** Which topics would you like to see covered in this course? ***

how to debug
different flavors (Jython, Iron Python)
unit tests
best practices regarding syntax/naming conventions etc.
web applications
modules, classes, inheritance, oo
SOAP
understanding Python core and deeper "under the hood"
best practices and programming idioms
usage/details of popular Python modules (NumPy, etc.)
network libraries
demonstration of SciPy
core libraries
idioms, Pythonic style
cover the full book
geoprocessing, scripting large spatial datasets
importing and exporting files
storage, caching data
speed and algorithms
computational biology
web programming
databases
see the basics hammered home!
unit test frameworks
excitement, motivation, inspiration
networking, HTTP
SciPy
SQL
Extending Python with C
Twisted, other networking modules
Django, other web frameworks
As much Python as we can muster!
NumPy and SciPy
some GUI work
unit testing 
oop thinking
Debugging.  ... Did I say *Debugging?*
resource usage (memory, file descriptors, garbage collection...)
threading
GUI programming 
key language basics
how to predict the stock market, where to find gold