Here's a simple tutorial on dictionaries in Python: Dictionaries: Dictionaries are similar to other compound types except that they can use any immutable type as an index. One way to create a dictionary is to start with the empty dictionary and add items. The empty dictionary is denoted {}:... (Read More)

!USING PYTHON 3.1! Hello DaniWeb! Today I'm going to be posting a simple threading tutorial. First of all, what is threading? Well, threading is just another way of doing a side task without interrupting the main program. Now here's a simple example. Let's say we are going to make a simple... (Read More)

Regex is one of the more complicated modules that you can use in python. Once you have learnt it though you can use it many different programming languages, so its a useful tool for using with strings. So first to use regex you must import it import re This loads the module for us to use. ... (Read More)

!USING PYTHON 3.1! Hello DaniWeb! Today I'm going to teach you a cool variable trick that I learned. So here's an example: a, b, c = input('?x?x?: ').split('x') Now let's input something like: (Read More)

Probably the simplest way to get into multimedia with Python is the webbrowser module. This works with both Windows and Unix systems, and selects the default browser you have installed. But that is not all: if you give it the name of a multimedia file it will select the default viewer or player,... (Read More)

Hey guys, I just wanted to let everyone know that functions can be used very constructively and there are more to them then most think. Okay this example function is actually pulled from a class of mine so it would probably make more sense in my class but it should make sense anyway. Right... (Read More)

Programming in PHP is fun and easy. It is a very powerful scripting language that takes simple HTML and turns it into a fully-interactive experience for the web user. Let's get started! Note: These tutorials assume that you have a working web server that's capable of displaying PHP code and that... (Read More)

Many of you know how to hide your important files and folders and burn them to disc to keep them from being accessed from other users, but if you your drive has so many files that it would take too long to copy all to disc, then why not hide the entire drive. Two methods, 1st one involves... (Read More)

With this method you can add any custom button to the Explorer Command Bar/Toolbar which I'm sure you have noticed that Vista and Windows 7 have excluded some familiar buttons, including the Delete Button/Icon. http://www.aeroxp.org/2008/06/custom-explorer-buttons/ If you just want the... (Read More)

If your application provides custom dialog-box features, menu items or other capabilities by making changes to the Windows Registry, you can deploy those capabilities to other computers simply by distributing an update or patch to the Registry. Updating the Registry involves nothing more than... (Read More)

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a simple menu using Flash, while the menu items themselves will be imported from an XML file called menu.xml. 1. Start by creating a new flash document which can be called anything you like as long as the size is set to 550 x 80 px and the frame... (Read More)

Although forms are one of the most boring elements of any website, styling them can be a dangerous business. All too often it is forgotten that the way a form looks will impact greatly upon what the user uses it for. Change the style too drastically and the user might not recognize it as a form at... (Read More)

This tutorial will explain how to code a perfectly cross-browser compatible, single-level drop-down menu for your website. The first thing you are going to need is a little bit of JavaScript courtesy of Suckerfish. This should be placed in a file called menu.js and saved in the same directory as... (Read More)

User input/output is a key component in the programs you write, yet most online tutorials just provide a quick-and-dirty method of grabbing data. In other words, it works right up until the point the user does something unexpected. In this tutorial you will learn how to avoid the common mistakes... (Read More)

In this tutorial you will learn how to turn your images into something more like a real photograph by simply adding a white frame to them. What’s more, the tutorial is easy enough for those new to Photoshop to be able to create something impressive, and create it quickly. First things first... (Read More)

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a stylish looking content box for your website. Before you start, however, you will need to have two custom patterns which should each be from a 5*5px image that just has a pencil line drawn diagonally across it. You need to create one of these with the... (Read More)

This tutorial will teach you how to create a transparent navigation bar for your website, similar to the navigation at the Microsoft Vista website. 1) Start by creating a new image in Photoshop with a height and width of 700*70px. 2) Filling the first layer with a dark background makes... (Read More)

This tutorial will enable you to create a tabbed navigation bar to use on your website. 1) Open PhotoShop and create a new document with the size 670*70px. 2) Grab the rounded rectangle tool and draw a rectangle on the canvas, you will need to set the radius to 5px. 3) Next you need to... (Read More)

Debian Linux is what you might call very, very flexible because it runs on nearly any hardware configuration, from Motorola chips to PowerPC to the x86 structure. So whatever your machine is Debian Linux can most likely run on it. However, because installation is so different between different... (Read More)

If one thing should be at the forefront of every system administrators mind, then it is security. Microsoft has been taking a lot of flack about not being as secure as they could be, and there has been a market swing in the use of the Firefox web browsers as a result. Some are also seeing a similar... (Read More)

One of the most important things to understand when automating office, is that it's heavily OOP, and therefore you are forced to work with objects. In order to create an object that is external to your application (for example an office application, whereas a button or textbox would be internal to... (Read More)

Very early on when attempting to learn programming in C, you often do exercises that read in and print out strings and numbers. Now you might assume that C has a simple function that will get user input, and indeed it does, but there are a couple of gotchas that can easily trip up those new to... (Read More)

Test Driven Development (TDD) is the amalgam of two programming techniques: Test-First Development (TFD) and Refactoring. Looking at the first of these, TFD literally means that before you write some functional code (in whatever programming language you happen to favor) you first write a small... (Read More)

There is little doubt that one of the most daunting tasks in all of computer programming is that of developing your own algorithms. Indeed, it is here where the term Computer Science comes to the fore as it is virtually a step-by-step process, so intricate and precise it truly is a science to... (Read More)

The aim of this tutorial is to save burgeoning self taught developers some of the early pitfalls that lurk on the road to programming enlightenment. It will attempt to do this by distilling the last 50 years of software engineering philosophy into a relatively short single tutorial, applying the... (Read More)