~vijaykumar

Chennaipy met again on the 24th of December, with Python users sharing tid bits, tips, tricks and their experiences with Python. We had about 12 members this time again. That was a bit of a surprise, since it was the day before Christmas, and there were speculations for a low turn-up. But as the actual head count shows, the community’s dynamics is hardly predictable.

The meeting started off with the MySQLdb talk by Abdul. Abdul described the APIs provided for connecting to a MySQL server, obtaining a cursor object and executing SQL statements.

The next talk was on xlrd, a library for extracting information from Excel spreadsheet. The talk was by Bala. Bala created a simple Excel sheet. He used xlrd to open the Excel file, select a sheet, and extract the contents of the cell by specifying the row and column no.

The next talk was on Python strings, by Rengaraj. Rengaraj a Python newbie, explained the following: C and Python strings differences, extracting characters, slicing, concatenation, replication, …

The next talk was on functional programming by Ashokan (from TalentSprint). He started off with an introduction to functional programming, and showed some examples using Haskell. He then showed how functional programming is useful in Python. He used a function to find a perfect square as an example, which he then extended to determine a perfect cube, by passing the squaring/cubing function as an argument.

The next talk was on closures by Vijay. Vijay first showed a simple counting funtion, which returns the next value in the sequence. He then showed how to build a counter that can count by the specified step. He defined a function gen_counter() that accepts the step size as argument, and returns a function that counts on the specified step size. The function returned by gen_counter() is associated with a state, the current count value and the step size. Vijay explained that such a function associated with a state is called a closure. Vijay also explained how the same thing could be acheived using OOP.

The next was supposed to be the Pycon Video, by due to some technical difficulties the screening of the video was cancelled.