How to Find AnswersTo Your Questions

Fundamental Topics Night
Boston Python Meet-up
September 23rd, 2013

CC.BY Finger Face, by Tsahi Levent-Levi on Flickr

CC.BY Question Monster by Paul Sableman on Flickr

Deb Nicholson,Python non-expert

I do not have all the answers

Ask the right question

Can you replicate it?

Can you replicate it?

Picking apart the error message

Can you replicate it?

Picking apart the error message

Take a break

Food & Coffee by Michael Dougherty, CC.BY.SA

Try turning it off and back on again

Ask the right questionin the right place

CC.BY Three Buckets by Adele Prince on Flickr

CC.BY Three Buckets by Adele Prince on Flickr

CC.BY Three Buckets by Adele Prince on Flickr

CC.BY Three Buckets by Adele Prince on Flickr

Questions about your tools or environment

OpenHatch

OpenHatch

IRC and GIT have help

OpenHatch

IRC and GIT have help

Your operating system

OpenHatch

IRC and GIT have help

Your operating system

Editors and IDE FAQ's

Links

https://openhatch.org/

http://freenode.net/faq.shtml

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/

http://www.linuxquestions.org/

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/

http://www.vim.org/docs.php

http://ipython.org/

http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs188/fa06/eclipse.html

Python questions

Python's own documentation

dir(random)

help(random)

Python's own documentation

Stack Overflow

Bonus: Your question may have already been answered

Minus: Dudes on the internet

Minus: Dudes on the internet...who will not do your homework

Python's own documentation

Stack Overflow

Google

Especially if you don't know where to start

Hints for search terms

Try rephrasing (use a thesaurus!)

Try rephrasing (use a thesaurus!)

Paste the whole error message

Try rephrasing (use a thesaurus!)

Paste the whole error message

Wikipedia (Celery isn't always a vegetable)

Celery + programming

Celery is an open source asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. (from Wikipedia)

Pickle, from Wikipedia in the Public Domain

...pickle is the standard mechanism for object serialization; pickling is the common term among Python programmers for serialization (unpickling for deserializing). (from Wikipedia)

Use lots of words and don't forget to put python or programming in there.

Links

docs.python.org/2/

http://docs.python.org/3/

http://stackoverflow.com/

http://pymotw.com/

Google and Wikipedia

Project specific questions

Check the docs

Check the docs

Search the bugtracker

Check the docs

Search the bugtracker

IRC or the mailing list

How to phrase questions

CC.BY.SA Question Face by Quinn Dombrowski on Flickr

snotty :(

CC.BY Free sofa massacre by walknboston, on Flickr

HI!!!

Specific is better

Using wrong library?orDifference between C++ random number generation and Python

Loads of details

What version of python?

What version of python?

Other programs that are involved

What version of python?

Other programs that are involved

What have you already tried?

Paste code and/or errorsinto your request orlink to pastebin.com

Quick Recap

Ask the right questionin the right place

CC.BY Three Buckets by Adele Prince on Flickr

There are places for nearly every question

Verbose is always better

diveintopython.net online and free!

Headfirst Python kid-friendly! (O'Reilly)

Learning Python beginner friendly! (O'Reilly)

Programming Python a bit denser (O'Reilly)

Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional (Apress)

Books and Tutorials

CC.BY Finger Face, by Tsahi Levent-Levi on Flickr

Questions?#bostonpython on freenode.net

CC.BY.SA Questions by Gillian Maniscalco on Flickr