Leaping Very Small Buildings
This weekend I was working through a tutorial for creating a very basic wiki using the Python web framework, TurboGears. The steps I had to take were:
- Download and install Python 2.4 from ActiveState
- Add c:\python24 and c:\python24\scripts to my path
- Download tgsetup.py
- Open a command prompt to the download location and "python tgsetup.py"
- Download python bindings for sqlite (a file based local database)
- Follow the wiki tutorial
For the purposes of complete disclosure, I started the tutorial and ran into some errors with sqlite, which led me to have to install the binary version and not compile it myself. But that only took a few minutes to figure out.
Otherwise, the tutorial was worthwhile as it gave me a good high level view of the different components that make up TurboGears, but also forced me to write (or at least copy and paste) some code.
Following simple instructions, along with judicious use of Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V is not exactly the stuff of legends. Compared to what I do at work on a day to day basis it is actually kind of sad. However, I realized that while I can map concepts from a known language to a new one, I still need to learn the new libraries; so the mundane, leaping the small buildings, will have to do for now.