"The best way to learn new programming techniques is to write an application that exercises them. This article will walk you through the process of building a simple Python application that interacts with a MySQL database. In a nutshell, the application picks up some live data from a web site and then persists it to an underlying MySQL database. For the sake of simplicity, it doesn't deal with a large dataset. Rather, it picks up a small subset of data, storing it as a few rows in the underlying database.
"In particular, the application gets the latest post from the Packt Book Feed page available at http://feeds.feedburner.com/packtpub/sDsa?format=xml. Then, it analyzes the post's title, finding appropriate tags for the article associated with the post, and finally inserts information about the post into the posts and posttags underlying database tables. As you might guess, a single post may be associated with more than one tag, meaning a record in the posts table may be related to several records in the posttags table."
