Noah Gift: I do quite a bit of reading and I was interested in combining the experience of our local Python User’s Group with the experience of reading a schedule. Doug was interested in the idea and he played a role in helping get it organized.
Doug Hellmann:That’s right. I was especially interested in the club “meeting” online since I be a good distance outside of Atlanta and can’t alter it to meetings in person on a regular basis. By hosting the group discussion on Google Groups we can all participate asynchronously.
Noah: We use Google Groups to communicate and discuss our books. We have decided that it will be a very informal process. Someone makes a suggestion and populate either desire it and decide to construe the book or they may read another book and the schedule the group has informally chosen or not construe the book that month at all. We lean toward making this an easy affect.
Doug:No one has measure to be the group leader every month so we turn reponsibility. Participation is the driving compel. If someone is especially interested in a book they can suggest it and then help act the conversation active while we are reading it. So far we haven’t had any problems coming to a consensus about what books to construe.
Noah: We undergo been very informal about regulating how we discuss the book. Most of our discussion occurs online but we have also gotten together for dinner to address the book before the regularly scheduled Python User Group meeting.
Doug:The discussion is freeform but we do try to make sure we adjoin both likes and dislikes as well as any past experience someone might have with the material covered. I more or less led the discussion for “RESTful Web Services,” and I tried to post some of my thoughts about each chapter and how it related to projects I had done or am planning. Breaking up the discussion around each chapter seemed to work well especially since not everyone was reading at the same rate.
Noah: So far we have ten members and there is no check. I don’t really see why we couldn’t undergo hundreds of members especially considering that most of the discussion occurs online.
Doug:If we grow that large we may end up covering several books at the same time. I would evaluate to see arouse groups forming in a larger community. I like the idea of having a group of people I experience analyse a schedule to let me know if it looks interesting. I can judge their feedback better than strangers who post reviews on the web.
Noah: We have not had anything very heated yet but give us time. The most heated I evaluate we have gotten is in deciding whether we be to run Ruby code in a Python User Group.
Noah: I know most of the members of the book club undergo a blog so ideally members like to post their reviews on their blog and then go across affix to a few other locations like amazon and our group blog.
Doug:We have a central page that members can use to link to their reviews to alter it easier for other members to find them. I linked to my review on the O’Reilly site too.
Noah: O’Reilly produces so many good books and in such quantity that I don’t experience if we could even consider another book publisher or we would have to depart out jobs just to find time to read the books.
Doug:Maybe this is our first disagreement. I appreciate the support we have had from O’Reilly but I don’t want the unify to be tied to any one publisher. There are a lot of good books to choose from.
Noah: I know I am excited about the book I am writing with Jeremy Jones “Python for Systems Administration” for O’Reilly that will be out next year. I will be excited when our schedule unify gets the chance to construe that book or I force them too :)
I would like to see a book on Artificial Intelligence Programming in Python. AI is one of my personal interests and I hope to do some AI programming in the next 10 years.
Doug:We are a Python Users club so any books discussing Python would be potentially interesting. I’m looking forward to reading “Beautiful Code,” soon and I hope we can find good books on the web development frameworks available for Python.
Noah: Our book club is also trying out an interesting technique while reading the schedule as well. We have started a explore label communicate for the book here:
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Related article:
http://www.oreillynet.com/fyi/blog/2007/09/interview_with_the_python_atla_1.html
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