Before we go to the list do you know what makes software skills most sought-after and hence more valuable than most of the other job skills? It is simply because unlike any other skill, software skills are global and are not at all location specific! With the evolution and penetration of internet technologies, the physical distance between the client and service provider hardly matters. So, with more advancement in technology, it is indeed going to rain opportunities on the right skilled developer. I’ll take the liberty to reproduce the following quotes here to prove my claims statistically:

Demand for “cloud-ready” IT workers will grow by 26 percent annually through 2015, with as many as 7 million cloud-related jobs available worldwide.

---IDC White Paper (November 2012).

In the United States, the IT sector is experiencing modest growth of IT jobs in general, with the average growth in IT employment between 1.1 and 2.7 percent per year through 2020.

---U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Although reports made in May 2010 indicate that Android had outsold Apple iPhones, more recent and current reports of the 2^nd quarter of 2011 made by National Purchase Diary (NPD) on Mobile Phone Track service, which listed the top five selling smartphones in the United States for the months of April-June of 2011, indicate that Apple's iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS outsold other Android phones on the market in the U. S. for the third calendar quarter of 2011. This was true for the previous quarter of the same year; The iPhone 4 held the top spot.  The fact that the iPhone 4 claimed top spot does not come as a surprise to the analysts; rather, it is a testament to them of how well the iPhone is revered among consumers. The iPhone 3GS, which came out in 2009 outsold newer Android phones with higher screen resolutions and more processing power. The list of the five top selling smartphones is depicted below:

1. Apple iPhone 4
2. Apple iPhone 3GS
3. HTC EVO 4G
4. Motorola Droid 3
5. Samsung Intensity II[1]

Apple’s iPhone also outsold Android devices7.8:1 at AT&T’s corporate retail stores in December. A source inside the Apple company told The Mac Observer that those stores sold some 981,000 iPhones between December 1st and December 27^th 2011, and that the Apple device accounted for some 66% of all device sales during that period (see the pie figure below) . Android devices, on the other hand, accounted for just 8.5% of sales during the same period.

According to the report, AT&T sold approximately 981,000 iPhones through AT&T corporate stores in the first 27 days of December, 2011 while 126,000 Android devices were sold during the same period. Even the basic flip and slider phones did better than Android, with 128,000 units sold.[2] However, it is important to understand that this is a report for one particular environment at a particular period in time. As the first iPhone carrier in the world, AT&T has been the dominant iPhone carrier in the U.S. since day one, and AT&T has consistently claimed that the iPhone is its best selling device.

Chart courtesy of Mac Observer: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/iphone_crushes_android_at_att_corporate_stores_in_december/

A more recent report posted in ismashphone.com, dated January 25 2012, indicated that Apple sold 37 million iPhones in Q4 2011.  It appears that the iPhone 4S really helped take Apple’s handset past competing Android phones. According to research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Apple’s U.S. smartphone marketshare has doubled to 44.9 percent.[3] Meanwhile, Android marketshare in the U.S. dropped slightly to 44.8 percent. This report means that the iPhone has edged just a little bit past Android in U.S. marketshare. This is occurred after Apple’s Q1 2012 conference call, which saw themselling 37 million handsets. Meanwhile, it’s reported that marketers of Android devices, such as Motorola Mobility, HTC and Sony Ericsson saw drops this quarter.

The importance of variables in any programming language can’t be emphasised enough. Even if you are a novice, the chances are good that you will have been using variables for quite a while now.

They are the cornerstone of any language and without them we would not be able to accomplish much of anything. However, most of you up until this point have probably only been working with standard variables, variables which can hold single values such as an integer, a single character, or a string of text.

In this tutorial we are going to take a look at a more special type of variable called an array. Arrays can seem quite daunting at first glance but once you get used to working with them you will wonder how you ever managed to program without them.

The reason arrays are special is because they can hold more than one value. Think about this: say you create a variable which contains a line of text like the code below:

Static variables in Python are created as part of the class declaration.  By contrast, instance variables are created as part of a regular method and not a classmethod or staticmethod.

class A:
  i=3  # static variable
	
  def dosomethingregularmethod(self):
       self.k=4   # instance variable
	
# to access static variables


A.i