Just one week shy of Christmas 2008, the Python world saw the release of version 3 of Python. Big deal, eh? Well ... it turns out it was and is, as Python 3 is the first major release of Python designed from the get-go to be incompatible with prior versions of the language. Python is well liked among the Linux Journal readership (winning the Favorite Scripting Language category in 2008), and such a development may come as a shock to some. A detailed description of all of the changes brought into Python 3 can be found in the what's new document, another interesting source can be found on the pythonology blog. Consequently, in this article, I don't intend to rehash such material. Instead, I present my own take on Python 3, as well as discuss what Python 3 means for the new and existing Python programmer.

If you're coming fresh from Microsoft Excel, you might wonder where the Pivot tables are in OpenOffice.org Calc. The problem is, they're masquerading under the name of DataPilots. But, under any name, DataPilots are Calc's way of allowing you to quickly reorganize information in a range of cells so that you can gain a new insight into them.

Problem: you're running your favorite application when you realize that there's a feature you want that is not yet implemented. You could write this feature yourself, but perhaps there is a similar application that has already implemented it for you.

Queries are the database equivalent of filters in a spreadsheet. Just as a filter can limit and reorganize the information displayed in a spreadsheet, so a query limits and reorganizes the information in a database. Either can be an efficient way of finding the information you want, especially when you're dealing with thousands of records.

Take a quick look at three Web framework technologies from the Python community.

Once you have a database set up, sooner or later you will want to edit its tables or add a new record. You have four ways to do so.

When databases became available for the personal computer in the mid-1980s, they quickly gained a mystique as the ultimate productivity applications. Despite their widespread use, in some ways they have never lost that mystique -- so much so that many desktop users will stretch the use of spreadsheets to cumbersome lengths rather than consider setting up a database.

When we were in college, my wife (then, girlfriend) had the best answering machine greeting message, ever. When people called her, the answering machine would answer, “Hello?” and wait. Invariably, the caller would start talking as though they had actually reached a live person. They'd be talking about last weeks assignments, or a party next week. Then the other shoe would drop.

The robustness and versatility of the Android open source operating system combined with extremely energy efficient E Ink could prove to be a marriage made in heaven, as this demonstration from labs.moto.com would suggest.

Presentation software isn't complicated compared to a word processor or spreadsheet. It doesn't need to be. Maybe that's why OpenOffice.org's Impress offers a variety of views of your work.

The last two articles that I wrote for Linuxjournal.com were about the steps that GCC goes through during the compilation process and were based on a software development class I taught a few years ago.

This article, and the one to follow, are based on a Software Development class I taught a few years ago. The students in this class were non-programmers who had been hired to receive bug reports for a compiler product. As Analysts, they had to understand the software compilation process in some detail, even though some of them had never written a single line of code.