I’m pretty determined to get a solid grasp of the Python programming language over the winter recess. It is accessible to the novice programmer, and very adept at text manipulation. I’ve been bouncing back and forth between:

Both of these resources are helpful in their own right. The Learning Python the Hard Way exercises are great for building confidence in how to use Python object types, functions, statements, and some more advanced concepts. Learning Python has been more helpful as a manual for getting a deeper explanation of the concepts covered in Learning Python the Hard Way’s exercises.

Using Python has also introduced me a very easy way to scrape web pages, using the Requests library. Using Requests, I cobbled together a Python script for scraping a consecutive series of URLs, and storing the data as HTML files. Additionally, the script adds a link to a minified version of Bootstrap, which needs to be stored locally. I’ll leave it to your imagination as far as what this script is for.