As I progress through FoSNLP, along with notes and questions about the material, I'm writing Python code to generate the tables and figures in the text and comparing my results to those shown in the book. I'm using Python 2.4.3 under Cygwin on a Windows XP SP2 system. Since I'm also a Python novice, this exercise is helping me kill two birds with one stone - improving my grasp of Python and reading a great NLP book.
I worked through the subsections of section 1.4 ("Dirty Hands") on word counts, bigram collocations, and concordances (writing a KWIC display) and skipped the Zipf's Law section as I'd already done some Zipf's Law graphing while working through the opening bits of Baayen's Word Frequency Distributions.