D520 - Week Four

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:54:19 +1200

This week continued from the previous one, covering Chapter 4 of IronPython in Action. That meant no new notes, and no new lab exercise. We basically did two things: worked through the MultiDoc example in Chapter 4, and worked on implementing the Airline lab designed in the previous week. The first recommended reading for the week was Part 1 of Joel Spolsky’s “Talk at Yale”, wherein he tries to relate his study to his career - the part I hoped they would find interesting was the discussion of “geeks” versus “suits”. The second recommended article was Steve Yegge’s “Code’s Worst Enemy”, which is mostly about code bloat. In retrospect, these might not be the best pairing, since Yegge is always long, and this particular Spolsky article is very long (if you read all three parts). However, I was again pleasantly surprised to hear that students were actually reading these. I was right to set aside a whole ’lecture’ section of a week for introducing MultiDoc - I used all two hours (with breaks and a late start, actually about 90 minutes) going over the code, and didn’t quite manage to finish - I got up to the very last section, but didn’t have time to go through adding the menubar/menu items (so I did that in the break and showed the working example afterwards).

Example on Tony Andrew Meyer

D520 - Week Four