When we last looked at job trends from indeed.com, job listings for "R statistics" were on the rise but were still around half the volume of listings for "SAS statistics". Three-and-a-half years later, R has overtaken SAS in job listings for "statistics".... (more…)

Students in my Python classes occasionally get the following error message: TypeError: object() takes no parameters This error message is technically true, as I’ll explain in a moment. But it’s surprising and confusing for people who are new to Python, be... (more…)

The classic British Broadcasting Company (BBC) sketch comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus and the films built by Pythons including Monty Python & the Holy Grail, Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life may be required viewing for comedy nerds of ... (more…)

Argparse is the straightforward standard library module for handling command line arguments, with a number of nice features. One of those nice features is groups of mutually exclusive arguments. If people can only give one of '--quiet' and '--verbose' and... (more…)

(Last Updated On: February 2, 2020)So you want to learn to program in Python and you don’t have a lot of time? That’s okay! Once you grasp some of the key concepts and ways of thinking, it will all come to you. So let’s get going now, shall we? What is Py... (more…)