This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.
After three Python lectures yesterday, we slowed down a bit today and looked at a pair of tools every professional programmer relies on: symbolic debuggers and version control systems. Paul Lu covered the former topic using WingIDE; Ken Bauer covered the latter using the SmartSVN GUI for Subversion. Working in pairs seems to agree with the students, though as is so often the case, installing and configuring tools is often more work than actually using them. We'll look at Python's sets and dictionaries tomorrow morning, then Paul Gries will give a quick introduction to image processing in the afternoon.