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I've taken the plunge and started to learn Python. My target is web-based applications so I needed to have this working under Apache 2.0/SuSE 9.3 on my development computer.

I originally had been developing using the XAMPP platform. That was extremely easy to setup on my SuSE 9.3 OS and worked well. Unfortunately XAMPP does not support Python out of the box. I'm sure that I could add it but I just wanted to get going on it. So I removed XAMPP and started install Apache 2.0, MySQL 4.1, PHP 4.3, phpMyAdmin 2.6, etc.

I've done this many times on Debian, Fedora and RedHat systems but this was the first time with SuSE. I very quickly found that the default setup seemed to be locked down pretty well. Unfortunately it took me quite some time searching though the various unfamiliar Apache configuration files to find out where best to adjust the security so that I could run the already installed PHP application on my system.

I finally created my first bit of Python code and was left scratching my head about the syntax error that I was getting. At this point I've done almost no looking at Python syntax so it never dawned on me that indenting of text was important. In my cut & paste from a web page I had not properly indented the code and that was a syntax error. I haven't ran into this kind of problem since I was writing code in Fortran IV that depended on punch card spacing.

I've now gotten Python Server Pages (PSP) working running with my first PSP application and I'm off to the races!

Now it's time to start actually learning Python. I love learning a new language!