Have seen jobs where PhD is "required". (Many data scientists tend to push this view as they feel it protects them and gives them elevated status).
Am also in the middle of training a group of future data scientists. The company is having issues hiring, and believe it is easier to train SME's in data science than the reverse.
This sponsoring is cool. I wonder if they would work with self-published books.
Writing a book is a huge effort (I'm the author of a couple Python books, one of which is on the current Python Humble Bundle). From speaking with (many) other Python authors, most would do better financially self-publishing. There are few titles that sell very well from publishers (they do 2nd, and 3rd versions), but these would probably do even better if they were self-published.
Of course, there are other reasons for publishing. (People really want their name on an animal book). One of those reasons is that a book is a really good business card. This is especially useful for consultants or when looking for a job. "Why yes, I do know about ...., in fact, I wrote a book on it".
I could blame quite a bit of my business (I do consulting and corporate training) on writing books.
Yeah, these slides were for a long conference talk that introduced the basic syntax of Python to developers who weren't familiar with Python.
(List) comprehensions are super cool, as are generators, decorators, etc, but there just wasn't enough time to cover that. Plus, as you say most code is boring, and you can get by with the material in this deck.
Just noticed this on my commute home (author of slides).
This is an old and condensed version of corporate training that I run. Typically the training runs for some 4 days. If you want a more modern version of this material (that you can submit your PR's to), check out my Python 3.6 reference[0].
If you have any questions, fire away, and I'll do my best to answer them.