This week's pick is a great book for those interested in practical applications and automation using Python.

Books:

• Automate the Boring Stuff (online) - The free book website.
• Automate the Boring Stuff (paperback) - Physical book from Amazon.

Picks are a bit late this week but the theme will be "Reddit". I spend arguably too much time browsing and reading interesting articles on various sub-reddits.

Websites:

• Reddit - The main site.
• /r/Programming - Discussion about programming in general.
• /r/TodayILearned - Learn something interesting? Post it here.
• /r/ExplainLikeImFive - Request simple explanations for any questions.

People in big cities are spoiled. Cities tend to offer numerous interesting meetups with dozens of members. Additionally, local makerspaces (or hackerspaces) are fairly common in larger areas.

Lately I have been involved in a few meetup groups around the Shenango and Mahoning Valley area. The experience has been very fulfilling and it is great to see smaller cities getting some interesting groups organized.

Events:

• HackYSU - YSU's first official meetup is this weekend. Only students …

The theme for the picks this week is "headphones". I frequently listen to podcasts and music so good headphones are a must.

Products:

• Audio-Technica ATH-M50s - Hands down the best sounding headphones I have owned. The only downside is the cable length which can sometimes be a nuisance as I tend to be only a foot or two away from the audio source. Consider the newer ATH-M50x model with removable cable.
• Motorola MOTOROKR S305 - Simple design …

Charles Max Wood produces some excellent programming-related podcasts. All his podcasts have a similar format which include a picks section near the end of each episode. During this section, a participant can suggest anything (not just programming related) that they have enjoyed or found useful. I am going to try something similar with this blog and post a list of picks weekly (or as close to weekly as possible).

Articles:

• I made an NES emulator …

Testing embedded systems with Python (or at all, really) is an extensive topic. This post is not going to dive too deep into the subject but instead suggest one potential approach from a high level as well as cover a few third party libraries that might make life a bit easier.

Before going any further, let's take a look at why you might want to incorporate Python into your test solution. Including a high-level scripting …

Did a quick comparison of some data serialization options for Python. My requirements for the serialization format were the following:

• Input data is typically either a list or a dictionary.
• Interoperability is important and must be compatible with at least C.
• A human readable format is desirable but not necessary.

Based on the requirements, I took a look at the following Python packages:

• PyYaml
• python-cjson
• ujson
• u-msgpack-python
• msgpack-python NOTE: Disqualified since had trouble running on …

After several years of regular Python use, I really admire that things work how I expect about 90% of the time. To be fair, the other 10% is typically user error. It is easy to overlook nuances in a language, even if you should know better.

I ran into this gotcha in Python recently: when importing a global variable from a module explicitly by name, that variable will be bound to the local namespace. If …