Building Skills in Programming

I've revised (and streamlined) my Building Skills in Programming book. The 2.6.2. edition will simply replace the 2.6.1. edition, leading to the possibility of broken bookmarks because of the changes.

Currently, the non-programmer book accounts for under 10% hits on the http://www.itmaybeaback.com/book site. Consequently, I'm not very worried about the breakage. I know someone will hate me for messing with the content just as they were starting to understand it.

I'm indebted to all my readers for the numerous suggestions, corrections and complements that I've received. In order to simplify the correction process, I've put the source onto SourceForge. See the Programming Book-Python 2.6 project.

The next step will be to add a PayPal donations button.

And... If I can get the PDF into really good shape, I may post it on Lulu for folks who really want a hardcopy.

Traffic

For a random 2-day period, the usage looks like this:

246 distinct "users" (really IP addresses).

{'html only': 161,
 ('both', 'oodesign-java-2.1'): 9,
 ('both', 'oodesign-python-2.1'): 5,
 ('both', 'programming-2.6'): 3,
 ('both', 'python-2.6'): 7,
 ('pdf only', 'oodesign-java-2.1'): 21,
 ('pdf only', 'oodesign-python-2.1'): 14,
 ('pdf only', 'programming-2.6'): 11,
 ('pdf only', 'python-2.6'): 37}

The "both" is a count of users reading HTML as well as the identified PDF editions.

For the "html only" and "both" users, there's a detailed list of particular books and sections. Too large and boring to repeat here.

One interesting part is this detail:

82.128.23.63 {'programming-2.6': 37, 'oodesign-java-2.1': 28, 'python-2.6': 37, 'oodesign-python-2.1': 24}

Apparently, Nigeria needs a lot of copies of the PDF. I think I might want to block them, because this can't be anything sensible except endless polling by some botnet script.

Since we don't drop off cookies, we can't really identify user sessions.

Maybe in the future, I'll wrap the static content download with a simple WSGI application to drop off and collect cookies to track users instead of IP addresses.