Not that that is a hard think to do. In fact, I expected to be in over my head a long time ago. While there have been occasional forays into things beyond my geek comfort zone, I could usually figure out B because I knew A and C. This one I was lost from go.

So, I’ve downloaded Become An Xcoder (a free pdf on programming Xcode), and we’ll see if I can go back and listen to it again in a couple months and actually understand it.

And thanks for referencing that Sesame Street sketch, and for mis-quoting it so that Emily linked to it. Haven’t seen that in ages.

Writing regex’s is absurdly simple, really. Reading them is damn-near impossible, but they are extremely simple when broken down.

Every single regex is basically just a combination of:
[characters to match][how many]

[a-z] matches any one letter, between a and z
[a-z]* matches zero or more a-z
[a-z]+ matches one or more a-z
[a-z]? matches zero or one character within a-z

. is a shortcut for any character, so you can do:
.* to match any number of any characters

I wrote an article a few week ago on the subject, catchily named “Regexs for people who should know regex, but do not”. The first bit explains the syntax, the second bit shows how to actually use them in various languages.

Oh, the link:
http://neverfear.org/blog/view/Regex_tutorial_for_people_who_should_know_Regex__but_do_not___Part_1/

Mass-renaming files is something I completely forgot to include in the article.. I can’t imagine using Renamer for Mac with anything but regexs (other than the sequentially-number files, which I pretty much always use in conjunction with regexs )

say I have a bunch of files named like…
the.linux.tv.show.s01e01, the.linux.tv.show.s01e02
.. and want then named like…
The Linux TV Show – [01x01]

I would use:
s(\d{2})e(\d{2})
and replace with
The Linux TV Show – [$1x$2]

The part of the regex in brackets become groups, which you can refer to via $1, $2 etc (or \1 \2 in Renamer for Mac)

\d is a shortcut for [0-9] (any decimal)

So it looks for s, then two decimal numbers (and stores them in group 1), then for “e”, and stores the next two numbers in group 2.

To space it out a bit:
s ( \d{2} )
e ( \d{2} )

Yeh, I could probably do that with a bunch of regular find-and-replaces, but with regex’s, it’s a single line operation, and once you know the basics, are very quick to write.

Anyway, enough regex-rambling. You’ve convinced me to give Quartz Composer another try – I’ve started to play with it a bunch of times, and never quite knew what I was supposed to make with it, got bored/mildly annoyed and quit. Never considered making a game in it..
- Ben

The link from Apple’s site is borked. Did you go to the sourceforge home page and search…? You’ll get a link to http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyobjc/ There are a few packages there. They download fine for me, though I haven’t tried using them. The python stuff looks interesting…

MacBreakTech folks,

You guys are awesome. Thanks for the laughs and the nudge to get back to learning how to program. I got stalled/distracted partway through learning RealBasic, but it’s time to get back on the horse again.

Talk to ya later, world.

1-How to Think Like a (Python) Programmer ( http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/ ).

2.How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
Java Version ( http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkapjava/ ).

3-How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
C++ Version ( http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkcpp/ ).

you can download the books freely in pdf and other formats.

Yeah I guess you did not talk about Cocoa apps. Sorry about that. I thought that if I want to do some python stuff in Xcode I might as well have a Cocoa app as a goal.

Yes, I found that page before and my problem is that contrary to what the Apple developer page says – there are no installable packages available at the PyObjC download page. They offer only some svn. Also the page is from 2005. So, I am a bit confused and do not really know how to continue. Perhaps the only way to continue is to get Leopard and Xcode 3? PyObjC seems to be included in it.

My previous programming experience is limited to HTML, PHP, Flash and some Python. I have recently become very interested in making apps for OSX but am a total n00b in this area. So, any future episodes about making apps for OSX are very welcome.

MacPro 4 cores, Tiger, Xcode 2.5

I don’t remember us talking about coding Cocoa apps using Python (as opposed to just writing in Python generally), but I assume you’ve seen this article?

http://developer.apple.com/cocoa/pyobjc.html

To follow up on John’s “check the source” comment, I’d suggest that you start playing with one of the AJAX libraries like jQuery, which make UI effects and manipulation of page elements straightforward(er).

http://jquery.com/

While doing that, keep something like this handy in case you’re unfamiliar with some of the language basics.

http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_examples.asp

Since what many of us are _doing_ with Javascript is writing browser-based applications or adding rich UI to a site, my suggestion would be to focus on understanding how the DOM works, and then getting some facility with one of the libraries (like jQuery). If you do want a guided tour, you might find more use from a book that focuses on your library of choice, rather than just a book on JavaScript.