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PyCon SQLAlchemy tutorial slides

My SQLAlchemy tutorial went pretty well for the most part. It was a fast pace but most people kept up pretty well. If I did it again I would add more of an intro to ORM in general for people who had never used one, but over half the attendees had used SO or django's or tried SA already. I would also paste more code from my slides into the samples download to save people typing during the exercises (I had some, but I would do more next time).

I think most people liked it; the main exception was one fellow who was in way way over his head and visibly pissed about it. (I used a list comprehension at one point and he had no idea what it was.)

The slides are here. (The .py files referred to in the slides have also been moved to the jellis/ subdirectory.)

Comments

Tim Parkin said…
You'll never get the level right for everyone and it's a lot better to pitch higher than lower. At least the guy went away with a big list of things to learn about which should be worth the price of admission itself :-)

As it is, I've looked through the slides and I really, really wish I'd been there .. Congrats!!

Tim
10:46 AM
Lee Capps said…
I knew the tutorial would be over my head (it said so right there in the course description) and signed up anyway for precisely the reason Tim gives. Realistically, I'm not going to learn SQLAlchemy and stored procedures and triggers and so on in a couple of hours. But now I know what I've got to learn if I want to use any of these tools.

That having been said, I did at least know what a list comprehension was, and I've used SQLObject a bit.

My only suggestion would be to encourage pairing on your exercises. I didn't have a clue where to start and didn't at first have your slides to refer back to; I don't think I was the only one. So waiting around for the solution was a bit of dead time.

Cheers!
3:19 PM
Jonathan Ellis said…
Pairing is a good suggestion. Thanks!
6:09 AM
Anonymous said…
is there possibility to get complete lecture toghether with slides?

The best would be flash movie (or sth) but simple audio file would be enough.

If not, Jonathan - maybe you can record it?
2:52 AM
Jonathan Ellis said…
Sorry; I'm happy to post the slides but I don't have an extra three hours to repeat the lecture/explanation into a mic. (Let alone post-processing to clean things up.)
7:55 AM
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