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Pedagogic advice needed

Jerzy Karczmarczuk karczma at info.unicaen.fr
Thu Jun 20 04:56:01 EDT 2002 
In my previous posting I asked about your experience
in teaching scientific programming/visualization in
Python (my case: to biologists, but this is not as relevant).

Thank you very much folks for all your helpful answers,
on this nsgroup and privately. I would just like to point
out that answers such as this and similar, often found
here:

Aahz wrote:

> From http://www.python.org/doc/Newbies.html
> you will find "Bioinformatics course in Python"
> at http://www.pasteur.fr/recherche/unites/sis/formation/python/


sometimes slightly miss the target. Of course I *AM GRATEFUL* to
Aahz Maruch, a known specialist, and I accept all help offered (I
am quite far from the sad hero of the thread named "Python version"),
but, believe me, sometimes people really need concrete, personal
experience, not just links to tutorials. I am not blaming Aahz, of
course, he couldn't guess what did I really need. The course of Katja 
Schuerer and Catherine Letondal (which I recommend to many newcomers) 
is an introductory course treating Python as a programming language, 
with examples oriented towards biology. I needed a dense, shock
material, explicitly application-driven, and with a good deal of
visualization examples, absent from the cited course. Once more:
I asked for your personal experience (mine isn't so bad, about
30 years of teaching...)

OK, I will look closer at SciPy, and the sources kindly mentioned
by Fernando Pérez.

As you know, the "scientific" (in the restricted sense) community
is interested in Python for years, yet in the huge Python FAQ,
especially in the section 'Real World' there is almost nothing
about this, God knows why... [[Anyway, people who are managing
this FAQs: http://www.python.org/doc/FAQ.html perhaps would one
day wish to update some links, eg. the first link pointing to docs:
http://www.pythonlabs.com/tech/python2.0/doc which points nowhere]].



> I imagine you might even be able to find some documentation in French.

Oh, yessir, indeed, thank you for this helpful hint. Merci beaucoup et
dziekuje bardzo in my native tongue as well.


Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Caen, France
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