Python

calibre is an e-book library manager. It can view, convert and catalog e-books in most of the major e-book formats. It can also talk to a few e-book reader devices. It can go out to the internet and fetch metadata for your books. It can download newspapers and convert them into e-books for convenient reading. It is cross platform, running on Linux, Windows and OS X.

http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/

Courtesy of MIT and its OpenCourseWare website, here’s a selection from their Electrical Engineering and Computer Science courses: “A Gentle Introduction to Programming Using Python”.

This course will provide a gentle introduction to programming using Python™ for highly motivated students with little or no prior experience in programming computers. The course will focus on planning and organizing programs, as well as the grammar of the Python programming language. Lectures will be interactive featuring in-class exercises with lots of support from the course staff.

Via RootPrompt comes this IBM developerWorks article on “Using Python to create UNIX command line tools”. I’ve been experimenting with Python off-and-on for a while now, and what I’ve seen so far I love. Thanks to Noah Gift for the, as he describes it, “command line interface manifesto.”

Can you write a command line tool? Maybe you can, but can you write a really good command line tool? This articles covers making a robust command line tool in Python, complete with built-in help menus, error handling, and option handling. For some strange reason, it is not widely known that the standard library in Python® has all of the tools necessary to make incredible powerful *NIX command line tools.

Arguably, Python is the best language for making *NIX command line tools, period, due to its batteries-included philosophy, and its emphasis on readable code. Just a warning, though; these are dangerous ideas, when you find out how easy it is to create a command line tool in Python, you might be spoiled for life. To my knowledge, there has never been an article published in this detail on creating command line tools in Python, so I hope you enjoy it.

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