Deep Learning, NLP, NMT, AI, ML
Python tutorials
From some of my other posts you’ve probably noticed that I’m a big fan of Node.js. While this is true, and has been my go-to language for a while now, I don’t always recommend it to everyone. Just starting out in programming and computer science can be a bit daunting. Which language should you pick? Which IDE should you use? And more importantly, why? In my opinion, the most important thing you should do when programming is choose the right […]
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Asynchronous programming has been gaining a lot of traction in the past few years, and for good reason. Although it can be more difficult than the traditional linear style, it is also much more efficient. For example, instead of waiting for an HTTP request to finish before continuing execution, with Python async coroutines you can submit the request and do other work that’s waiting in a queue while waiting for the HTTP request to finish. It might take a bit […]
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As with just about any open source software package, there are quite a few ways to install Python on Mac OSX. I figured it would be helpful to detail a few of the easiest ways to install Python, including the following: These are the most commons you’ll encounter, and each method has its own purpose, all of which I’ll detail in the sections below. Instructions for installing Python 2 and 3 are different in most cases (but not by much), […]
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There are quite a few ways to solve a problem in programming, and this holds true especially in Python. Many times you’ll find that multiple built-in or standard modules serve essentially the same purpose, but with slightly varying functionality. Checking if a file or directory exists using Python is definitely one of those cases. Here are a few ways to check for existing files/directories and their nuances. Throughout these examples we’ll assume our current working directory has these files and […]
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It is often considered best practice to create getters and setters for a class’s public properties. Many languages allow you to implement this in different ways, either by using a function (like person.getName()), or by using a language-specific get or set construct. In Python, it is done using @property. In this article I’ll be describing they Python property decorator, which you may have seen being used with the @decorator syntax: class Person(object): def __init__(self, first_name, last_name): self.first_name = first_name self.last_name […]
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There are quite a few ways to send email with Python, whether it be through a 3rd party library like with boto and SES, or through an email protocol like SMTP. While the subject of using Python to send emails may seem like it’s been done to death, there are just so many different ways to do it and so many issues that can come up. I thought it would be helpful to write up a tutorial on how to […]
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Introduction In this article, we’ll be parsing, reading and writing JSON data to a file in Python. Over the last 5-10 years, the JSON format has been one of, if not the most, popular ways to serialize data. Especially in the web development world, you’ll likely encounter JSON through one of the many REST APIs, application configuration, or even simple data storage. Given its prevalence and impact on programming, at some point in your development you’ll likely want to learn […]
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Python is a unique language in that it is fairly easy to learn, given its straight-forward syntax, yet still extremely powerful. There are a lot more features under the hood than you might realize. While I could be referring to quite a few different things with this statement, in this case I’m talking about the decorators @classmethod and @staticmethod. For many of your projects, you probably didn’t need or encounter these features, but you may find that they come in […]
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In this article we go over the Python file types .pyc, .pyo and .pyd, and how they’re used to store bytecode that will be imported by other Python programs. You might have worked with .py files writing Python code, but you want to know what these other file types do and where they come into use. To understand these, we will look at how Python transforms code you write into instructions the machine can execute directly. Bytecode and the Python […]
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In this article, we will take a look at two of the most popular web frameworks in Python: Django and Flask. Here, we will be covering how each of these frameworks compares when looking at their learning curves, how easy it is to get started. Next, we’ll also be looking at how these two stands against each other with concluding by when to use one of them. Getting Started One of the easiest ways to compare two frameworks is by […]
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