Thanks for coming to my Introduction to Python talk - especially if you were one of those brave souls who sat through the no-screen version at PenguiCon (ouch!)

Here are the various ways you can relive the experience.

The bare text of my slides is available at pyIntro.soc

If you want to run the simulations, you'll need to install Visual Python (vPython).

To study and play with the simulations, I recommend skipping the incrementally-completed versions I used during the presentation. "Final" versions are

  1. body4.py - subclasses vPython's sphere to represent a heavenly body subject to gravity
  2. solarSystem4.py - generates a number of planets plus a sun
  3. solarSim4.py - overall driving script
To play, just type at the command prompt: solarSim4.py 8 (or however many planets you want). Then dig into the code and start to change things. It's been suggested that my planetary collisions should be more exciting - go to town!

If you want to see the whole presentation the way I presented it - with the Bruce presentation tool running through the presentation text - you'll need to install Bruce. Bruce can also be installed by easy_install:

  1. download and run ez_setup.py (if you've never used easy_install on your machine before)
  2. run easy_install bruce
  3. run socrates.py pyintro.soc
Note that this presentation doesn't run under Windows.

The tarball of all the presentation's content is here.

Given (so far) at

- Catherine Devlin, May 2 2007

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