Python Tutorial 2.4 in eBook Format

I installed Plucker on my Palm IIIxe last week. Plucker is an offline web and and ebook viewer for Palm based handhelds. The parser that comes with Plucker can create ebooks from a number of sources including RSS, RDF, text files and HTML to name a few. On the Plucker web site there is a samples page which provides several example Plucker documents to download.

I was eager to try out the parser on some offline documentation I am currently reading. The current Python Tutorial seemed like a good choice as I reference it a fair amount at the moment. Following the Plucker documentation for creating an ebook I soon had a reasonable ebook copy I could upload to my PDA. After previewing it I decided that the original HTML source document would need to be modified a bit to better present the content on the PDA.

I stripped out the graphical header and footer from the original tutorial, leaving just the textual links for navigation. I ran the parser again with the following options,

Spider.py -v --no-urlinfo --noimages --zlib-compression \
  -H Python-Docs-2.4/tut/tut.html -N "Python 2.4 Tutorial" -f PyTut_24

and it produced a resulting Palm Database (.PDB) format file which was only 108K in size.

If you are using Linux and have the pilot link conduits installed, you can sync it to your Palm PDA using the following syntax,

pilot-xfer -p /dev/pilot -i PyTut_24.pdb

The Python Tutorial 2.4 ebook can be downloaded below.

• Python Tutorial 2.4

Pippy: Python for the Palm

The other night I was browsing the internet searching for some Python stuff and I stumbled upon this. Pippy is a port of Python 1.5.2+ to the PalmOS. After reading the web site I went looking for my old Palm IIIxe handheld, dropped in some fresh AAA's and plugged it into the cradle which was attached to my Fedora Core 3 box. After transfering the two .prc files over to the Palm I had a working subset of Python on my old PDA. The developers even included a feature that allows one to write your own Python modules in the memo pad application and then import them into the interpreter.