Automatic Computer Language Help Bookmarks

After seeing the old post I referenced in my last blog entry, I thought I'd dig out the code to auto-generate computer language help bookmarks and update it.

Nowadays I try to use Python for all my programming tasks. A while ago, I would have been able to use pyGoogle to do my Google searches, but that SOAP based interface no longer seems to work, and we are dependent upon the Google AJAX Search API.

There doesn't seem to be an extensive Python API to that, but looking around I did find this simple working example and used that as the basis of my script.

This language_bookmarks.py script will, for 36 languages, automatically generate a web page containing the top Google search results for the topics of 'Home Page', 'Reference', 'FAQ', 'Tutorial' and 'HOWTO'. Here's the results (with the initial and final HTML commands removed so that I can embed it here):

Ada: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Asp: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Awk: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Basic: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Boo: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

C: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

C++: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

C#: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Caml: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Cobol: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Eiffel: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Erlang: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

F#: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Forth: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Fortran: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Haskell: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Java: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

JavaScript: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Lisp: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Lua: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Oberon: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

OCaml: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Oz: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Pascal: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Perl: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

PHP: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Prolog: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Python: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Rebol: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Rexx: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Ruby: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Scala: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Scheme: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Scriptol: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Smalltalk: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

Tcl: [Home Page] [Reference] [FAQ] [Tutorial] [HOWTO]

It's very simplistic. I'm not trying to use standards or get as complex as I did last time.

Some of the results are still a little bogus, or in some cases, just a bit too specific. I suspect they could be improved by using better search query strings. Another possible improvement is to check all the search results returned by the Google query, and use the one which has the most keywords in the title (rather than always using the first result).

[Technorati Tag: Languages]

[Technorati Tag: Google]

[Technorati Tag: Bookmarks]

( Sep 01 2008, 09:05:26 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink