Mark Pilgrim (software developer)
| Mark Pilgrim | |
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| Born | November 24, 1972 |
| Residence | Apex, North Carolina, United States |
| Website | diveintomark.org (archived) |
Mark Pilgrim is a software developer, writer, and advocate of free software. He authored a popular blog, and has written several books, including Dive into Python, a guide to the Python programming language published under the GNU Free Documentation License. Formerly an accessibility architect in the IBM Emerging Technologies Group, he started working at Google in March 2007.
In 1992, while a sophomore of Cornell University and a part-time employee of a Cornell computer center, Pilgrim and another student, David Blumenthal, embedded a computer virus, "MBDF", into three games that were transferred to an archive at Stanford University, causing disruption to computers internationally. The origin of the virus was traced, and Pilgrim and Blumenthal were arrested on the misdemeanor charge of "second-degree computer tampering". The two students were found guilty, ordered to pay restitution to those affected and perform ten hours of community service every week for a year.
Pilgrim's book Dive Into Python is a teach-by-example guide to the paradigms of programming in Python and modern software development techniques. It assumes some preexisting knowledge of programming, although not necessarily in Python. The first edition was published in 2004 (ISBN ), and a 2009 second edition (ISBN ) covers Python 3. Both are available online as well as in print.
Much of the book consists of example programs with annotations and explanatory text, and it generally describes how to modify an example to serve new purposes. One early example program reads through a directory of MP3 files and lists the header information, such as artist, album, etc. Other topics covered include object oriented programming, documentation, unit testing, and accessing and parsing HTML and XML.
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