Recently, I've been involved in some hair-splitting over the nature of Python.

I've described it as "interpreted", "scripting" and "dynamic", all of which seem to be true, but yet each seems to lead to a standard -- and pointless -- dispute.

From time-to-time I hear a few mentions of MapReduce; up until recently, I avoided looking into it.

This month's CACM, however, is chock-full of MapReduce goodness.

After reading some of the articles, I decided to look a little more closely at that approach to handling large datasets.

Completely revised Building Skills in Object-Oriented Design. Cleaned up many of the exercises to make them simpler and more sensible to the n00b designer.

Also, to make it easier to follow, I made use of the Sphinx "ifconfig" feature to separate the text into two parallel editions: a Python edition …

I made some fundamental changes to the text processing pipeline. I think I've corrected all of the typographical and production problems. (Plus, I fixed some content errors, too.)

I've republished the Building Skills in Python, both HTML and PDF.

Hopefully, this is considerably better and more usable.

Next step -- revising …

I've updated Building Skills in Programming -- an introduction to programming for non-programmers.

The entire thing was redone in RST and Sphinx, leading to an easier-to-read, more colorful layout. The cross-references are generally better and more complete. I also get Sphinx's indexing and search capabilities.

Everything was touched, chapters were added …

Browsers are required to skip over bad HTML and render something.

Consequently, many web sites have significant HTML errors that don't show up until you try to scrape their content.

Beautiful Soup has a handy hook for doing markup massage prior to parsing. This is a way of fixing site-specific …

After installing Python 2.6 in Mac OS X, I had problems with BBEdit not finding the right version of Python. It kept running an old 2.5 version.

I finally tracked down the BBEdit documentation, http://pine.barebones.com/manual/BBEdit_9_User_Manual.pdf.

Found this: "BBEdit expects to find Python …

Ugh. When you try to parse MS-generated HTML, you find some extension syntax that is completely befuddling.

I've tried a few things in the past, none were particularly good.

In reading a file recently, I found that even Beautiful Soup was unable to prettify or parse it.

The document was …

Python's packages and modules are -- generally -- quite elegant.

They're relatively easy to manage. The __init__.py file (to make a module into a package) is very elegant. And stuff can be put into the __init__.py file to create a kind of top-level or header module in a larger package …

I haven't written new C code since the turn of the millennium. Since then it's been almost all Java and Python. Along with Java and Python come JUnit and Python's unittest module.

I've grown completely dependent on unit testing.

I'm looking at some C code, and I want a unit …