Notes from
the Instructor

General installation help: 6:30-8:00PM Tuesday & Wednesday in Open Spaces.

SQL for Python Developers

The long-awaited week of PyCon 2012 is finally here! It will very soon be Wednesday morning, the smell of venue-brewed coffee will be wafting through the room, and we will only have 3 hours of class time in which to cover as much information about SQL as possible.

How can you be ready?

• Have your laptop
• Have Python 2.6 or 2.7 installed
• Download the sqlite documentation
• Download the SQLAlchemy documentation
• Be sure that Python can import sqlite3 successfully
• Install sqlite3 from its web site.
• Download movie.db (190 MB)
• Confirm that you can run the sqlite3 command-line tool on the movie.db database, and that you get a single result when you type:

  SELECT * FROM movie WHERE title = 'Star Wars'

• Install SQLAlchemy by downloading the bare virtualenv.py script and running it to create a virtual environment where you can easily install SQLAlchemy:

  python virtualenv.py sqa
  cd sqa
  bin/pip install sqlalchemy
  bin/python -c 'import sqlalchemy'

  If the import statement runs without error, then your installation is successful!

Please set up your laptop as soon as possible from the list of bullet points above, so that we do not have to consume class time getting laptops configured. If you have any problems getting the above items to work, simply email the instructor early in the week — he loves to help — or show up at the installation-help Open Space mentioned above on Tuesday evening.

Hopefully we will be able to hit the ground running at 9am. If anything should go wrong with your laptop's configuration, then don't worry, we will have a TA available to help you — but by getting everything working ahead of time you make it the most likely that your class experience won't be interrupted with installation problems.

Thank you very much, and see you all in Santa Clara!

brandon@rhodesmill.org