I just read through the Python tutorial and believe I understand most of the language features conceptually, but I'm looking for examples of how they are actually used in practice. Does anyone know of any good publicly available Python repos I could skim through to get an idea of best practices?
Videos
As pengwynn said -- currently this is not easily doable via GitHub's API alone. However, have a look at this alternative way of querying using the GitHub Archive project: How to find the 100 largest GitHub repositories for a past date?
In essence, you can query GitHub's historical data using an SQL-like language. So, if having real-time results is not something that is important for you, you could execute the following query on https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/?pli=1 to get the top 100 Python repos as on April 1st 2013 (yesterday), descending by the number of forks:
SELECT MAX(repository_forks) as forks, repository_url
FROM [githubarchive:github.timeline]
WHERE (created_at CONTAINS "2013-04-01" and repository_language = "Python")
GROUP BY repository_url
ORDER BY forks
DESC LIMIT 100
I've put the results of the query in this Gist in CSV format, and the top few repos are:
forks repository_url
1913 https://github.com/django/django
1100 https://github.com/facebook/tornado
994 https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask
...
The intent of Repository Search API is to find Repositories by keyword and then further filter those results by the other optional query string parameters.
Since you're missing a ?, you're passing the entire intended query string as the :keyword. I'm sorry, we do not support your intended search via the GitHub API at this time.