My employer provides me with a generous annual training budget and I'd like to use it on one of the following two Python courses. As a GIScientist, I would like to attend the course which will give me the most robust skillset for both day-to-day tasks and larger customized interactive mapping applications. In the future I would love to be able to develop custom web-map apps using all open-source (QGIS, PostGIS, etc), but am currently wedded to ESRI. I do not have a programming background but have experience writing Python scripts mostly using Arcpy.

Learning Tree appears to be a more generic programming course with specific mentions of implementing classes and objects, accessing SQL databases, GUI development in Tkinter, and utilizing Django frameworks.

Enthought is geared towards scientists (my field) and engineers with specific mentions of Numpy, SciPy, matplotlib, and pandas for computation, building GUIs with Traits, and Chaco and Mayavi for visualizations.

  • Yea, I'm really looking for some informed feedback on what some of the more experienced Python users think I'll be prepared to do walking away from one versus the other, specifically which of those will benefit more to develop with QGIS vs Esri. – mikeLdub Oct 2 '14 at 20:12
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    What a nice dilemma to have -- a generous annual training budget. If you are already a scientist, you will probably find it easier to pick up numpy/scipy/matplotlib stuff yourself, as it is "easy" to play around with one liners and get immediate results, multiply this by that, plot this, etc. It is, imho, harder to pick up OOP, functional programming, db access, exception handling, iterators, list comprehensions, and all that other fun stuff that will make you a good all round programmer -- but will still be really beneficial in a scientific context. Just my 2c. – John Powell Oct 2 '14 at 20:18
  • If you are a scientist, choose Enthought (scientific computing in Python). If you only want to learn seriously Python, choose what you want. – gene Oct 2 '14 at 20:25