Python programming is all the rage, because the language has such simple, clean syntax, is easy to learn and has lots of libraries available. But best of all, you're not limited to writing command-line applications. Python has at least four ways to make graphical apps, but today I'll concentrate on one: TkInter.

Just one week shy of Christmas 2008, the Python world saw the release of version 3 of Python. Big deal, eh? Well ... it turns out it was and is, as Python 3 is the first major release of Python designed from the get-go to be incompatible with prior versions of the language.

Everyone knows Pygame is a super-fast way to produce cross-platform games. But its one major flaw is that it's very slow to do simple operations such as scaling, rotating and recoloring. In fact, even making extensive use of transparency can be a bit slow, so I've produced a new graphics toolkit that makes all those things extremely fast, and I've called it Gloss.

This is the second article in my Python everywhere series and covers the use of Python in computer games.

Python is a great programming language and one of the easiest to learn. That doesn't mean that it isn't capable of powerful stuff, however, because Python is known to handle almost every kind of programming task quite well. From basic scripting to enhanced graphical 3D programs: Python can do it all.

According to the blurb on the book's back cover, "This book offers a highly accessible introduction to natural language processing, the field that supports a variety of language technologies, from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation".

Python is a very popular interpreted scripting language. C is a very popular compiled language. Due to its compiled nature, C is generally faster than Python, but is lower-level, making Python programming quicker and easier than C programming.

So I’ve been coding some Python lately, because this is the language of choice for the “Computational Physics” course I’m attending. As the name says, it is more about physical and numerical problems than about programming, and the instructors chose Python as it’s easy to get into.

I am currently writing a Python application that makes use of GNU Autotools as build system and noticed that determining whether a specific Python module is installed is not that easy and no usable Autoconf macro exists. So I came up with my own solution, which I would like to share with you...