I've upgraded my Building Skills in Python to cover the 2.5 release. It didn't take as long as I'd anticipated.

The new features list for Python 2.5 is mercifully short. I did a fair amount of reorganization to consolidate some things that had grown or split needlessly.

Changes …

I hate to complain, but there's a Python syntax rule that has slightly cramped my style. The problem stems from a need to describe a really complex and extensible structure.

We need to describe X12N messages, which have a rather complex structure, and the structure can be customized. While the …

See Sean McGrath's Spot the warning signs in configuration file design for thoughts on the ever-gnarly problem of how to provide a workable set of configuration parameters to a program.

A programming language has all the advantages as a language for encoding parameters. I see why it's rare -- too many …

See Present Perfect for some thoughts on unit testing. See some other commentary on the discipline required to write Python programs in Gnome devs too lazy for python . I think I see the disconnect that makes testing appear to be too costly; I think that some basic "meta-quality attributes" are …

Here's part of a recent email, subject "Antique Programmer in search of face lift and/or brain transplant as appropriate...". It was from a VP/Director kind of person who'd been away from hands-on technology for a few years.

"I’ve got a new Vista PC with dual drives so …

Since I spend a lot of time on skill upgrades for my clients, my books are oriented around that theme. It's something that I learned from Jim Bullock : there's a Clue Absorption Rate, and you can't exceed that rate. These books are about building skills incrementally.

I've got three Python-related …

Why Python, indeed?

"It's clear that you find it easier and quicker to use Python, and that's fine. It's often quickest for people to use the tools that they know best."

As they say on Fark.com, "This".

However, the Python advantage doesn't stem from knowing Python better than Java …

The question seemed simple, which testing framework is the simplest? The situation is complex. There's a web application, there are developers and there are testers. The developers develop, and the testers test. So far, not so complex.

Here's the complexity. The testers are pretty focused on manual point-and-click testing. They …

The problem with Python is the vastness of the Open Source community. You may think you have something cool for HTML parsing , but then someone tells you about Beautiful Soup which already does it.

In my defense, I actually did a version of this HTML parsing back in '02. Indeed …

The mixed content model, defined succinctly in the XML standards, is pleasant enough for human communication, but leaves a lot to be desired. For example, mapping a mixed content model to a relational database is a hard problem.

The problem is made worse when the document is HTML. HTML doesn't …