Two months ago we started our ShowMeDo Club where paying subscribers get access to specially crafted Python tutorials. These series are generally much longer and more involved than most of the free videos on ShowMeDo, they tend to include exercises with worked solutions too.
We’ve had a very good response and everyone who has bought access has sent me great feedback. It is really rather rewarding to receive feedback from individuals who have benefited from my series. I’m also very happy to say that Kyran (my business partner) and John are about to start authoring Club videos too, again focusing on Python – from wxPython GUIs to CGI and the Google App Engine.
My most recent series have been for unit-testing a website using Twill and pyWin32 and COM programming for Python.
The Twill series is about teaching the same test framework that we use to reliably test ShowMeDo. The pyWin32 series is a collection of tips basically for using Excel as a cheap charting tool for Python with just a few lines, then builds up to writing a full COM server in Python.
These are all a part of our ‘python tutorial‘ section which now contains over 231 Python videos – how cool is that? I’ve also been making free screencasts on topics like installing easy_install, installing nose_tests and installing twill.
These are just short videos but they seem to really help out new users – if you’re used to a web-based installer, but the interweb is playing up, then you don’t know what the error message you see is all about. These 3 videos are there just to show how a successful install looks, with a check at the end to confirm everything is there.
I’m up to 96 videos now (see them here) which puts me at the head of the nbr-of-videos table, though Dai is quite close with 73 videos on topics like OpenOffice and Scribus. Very soon I’ll have over 100…I wonder how many minutes that is?