The Invent with Python Blog

Writings from the author of Automate the Boring Stuff.

Make Lively Movement Animation with PyTweening's Tweening Functions

Tue 20 February 2024 Al Sweigart

Tweening functions allow you to easily add many different styles of natural-seeming movement to the graphics in your program. In this blog post, you'll learn about how tweening functions can make more lively movement animations using Pygame and the PyTweening third-party library. Tweening functions apply to any programming language, but this tutorial has actual Python code for you to run and experiment with. Start by installing these libraries by running pip install pygame and pip install pytweening from the terminal. Then follow along with the code examples.

Using ChatGPT-4 to Review My Recursion Programming Book

Thu 15 June 2023 Al Sweigart

My 2022 book, The Recursive Book of Recursion (read online for free, buy direct from the publisher) covers recursive algorithms, a notoriously tricky subject for programmers and computer science students. I feel like I did a good job writing it (and my editors at No Starch Press did an incredible job editing it), but I wondered how well Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT could understand it. I ran the entire book through to see what mistakes or changes ChatGPT would make. The results were disappointing in some places but pleasantly surprising in others, so I wrote this blog post about the role AI could play in editing technical books.

Book Review: Python Distilled

Tue 28 March 2023 Al Sweigart

5 stars. Python Distilled has a perfectly suited title: This book is for experienced programmers who want to learn Python and need the Python programming language's core syntax, standard library, and Pythonic idioms. However, if you're a developer who wants to add Python to your toolbox, I recommend Python Distilled as one of the first books you should read.

Book Review: Python in a Nutshell

Tue 28 March 2023 Al Sweigart

5 stars. Python in a Nutshell is an excellent book for professional developers who have some experience with Python but want to take the leap to being a senior Python developer, Python in a Nutshell is required reading.

How to Run Pip From The Python Interactive Shell with pipfromrepl

Sun 20 November 2022 Al Sweigart

If you are an instructor leading a Python programming workshop, getting third-party PyPI packages installed on students' machines with pip has several hurdles: navigating the command-line, operating system differences, distinguishing between pip and pip3, dealing with multiple versions of Python, misconfigured PATH environment variables, and virtual environments are all possible pitfalls.

You can avoid all of this and save time by using pipfromrepl, which allows you to install PyPI packages from the interactive shell. These same steps work no matter what the computer's Python setup is.

Python Linter Comparison 2022: Pylint vs Pyflakes vs Flake8 vs autopep8 vs Bandit vs Prospector vs Pylama vs Pyroma vs Black vs Mypy vs Radon vs mccabe

Sat 19 November 2022 Al Sweigart

As you can tell from the lengthy title, there are many linting tools for Python. Some of them have near-identical names as each other. In November 2022, I upgraded my text editor to Sublime Text 4 and then took the opportunity to spend a few hours reviewing all of the Python linters I could find. After personally reviewing all of them, I've selected the following as must-haves: Pyflakes, Mypy, and Black. If you'd like additional tools, I also liked: Radon, Pyroma, and docformatter. I'm using Python 3.12.0. I don't care for my linter to point out when I stray from the certain dictates in the PEP 8 document, and my linter choices reflect that. You might have different needs and values than I, so in this blog post I give my reasoning and views for each linter.

Installing Brython to Get Python in Your Browser

Mon 31 October 2022 Al Sweigart

JavaScript is not the only programming language you can run in the browser. Brython is a Python interpreter implemented in JavaScript so you can run Python code in your browser. This lets you have a Python interactive shell without having to install Python. You can also write Python code to interact with the DOM and create browser apps just like you could with JavaScript. The primary downside is that a browser must download about 6 megabytes of JavaScript files before it can run, which can be a significant delay. This blog post guides you through setting up Brython.

17 Online Python IDEs and Interactive Shells/REPLs

Sun 30 October 2022 Al Sweigart

Installing Python is easy, but maybe you're on a smartphone/tablet, are on a library computer that doesn't let you install software, or can't install Python for some other reason. This article has a list of 10 free Python interpreters and interactive shells (also called REPLs) that you can access from a web browser.

Is Python Compiled or Interpreted?

Mon 10 October 2022 Al Sweigart

The short answer is: Python is interpreted. But it can also be considered compiled, both compiled and interpreted, and neither compiled nor interpreted. Read on to untangle these definitions.

How to Run Pip From The Python Interactive Shell

Thu 25 August 2022 Al Sweigart

Installing Python modules with the pip tool is surprisingly hard to describe to beginners learning to code. There are several potential issues: multiple Python installations, virtual environments, PATH environment variable settings. You have to introduce command-line terminals and file system navigation, and the differences between Windows and Mac/Linux. However, there is a line of code you can run from the interactive shell to handle all this for you.

Introducing Humre: Human-Readable Regular Expressions

Tue 23 August 2022 Al Sweigart

Regular expressions (aka regexes) are a mini-language to specify a pattern of text to look for. However, regex syntax is composed of various punctuation marks that can be hard to remember. Humre is a Python module that gives a more human-readable syntax that works better with code editing tools. You can install Humre just like any other Python module with pip install humre and the full documentation is available in the git repo's README file.

How Many Recursive Cases and Base Cases Does a Recursive Function Need?

Sun 20 March 2022 Al Sweigart

Let's look at a simple example of a recursive function to see what it needs at minimum.

Make Fractals in Python Turtle with the FractalArtMaker Module

Wed 09 March 2022 Al Sweigart

FractalArtMaker is a module for creating fractal art in Python's turtle module. You can install the module by running pip3 install FractalArtMaker

How to Use Python 3.11's New TOML Parser, tomllib

Wed 23 February 2022 Al Sweigart

Python 3.11 will include a TOML parsing module called tomllib. Let's learn what TOML files are (they're similar to JSON), how they're useful for configuration files, and how you can write Python code to read them.

Downloading Web Pages and Files in Python 3 and 2 Without the Requests Module

Mon 21 February 2022 Al Sweigart

How to download web pages and files off the internet only using Python 3 and 2's standard library.

Book Review: Make Python Talk

Thu 13 January 2022 Al Sweigart

Mark H. Liu’s “Make Python Talk” is a solid book for anyone who wants to leverage the power of the Python programming language to add speech capabilities to their programs. The chapters cover third-party libraries for speech recognition and text-to-speech in an engaging way.

Book Review: Serious Python

Thu 13 January 2022 Al Sweigart

Serious Python by Julien Danjou is an excellent book for those who have gone through the "hello world" tutorials or those coming to Python from other programming languages, and want a book that teaches you not just how to write code, but how to write code the pythonic way.

Book Review: Tiny Python Projects

Thu 13 January 2022 Al Sweigart

Writing for an intermediate audience is hard, but Ken Youens-Clark has nailed it with Tiny Python Projects. This is a great book for those who have dabbled with a few beginner Python tutorials but still feel like they don't "get" programming. The projects in this book are short and simple; perfect for beginners who want to get experience with actual programs instead of just code snippets.

How to Represent a 2D Grid in Python Code

Tue 28 December 2021 Al Sweigart

This blog post examines different ways that Python lists and dictionaries can be used to represent a 2D data structure. I also write some test programs to measure the performance of each data structure.

How to Test Multiple Variables Against a Single Value and a Single Variable Against Multiple Values in Python

Mon 20 December 2021 Al Sweigart

Python has a more concise syntax that uses the in operator and the multiple values packaged in a tuple. To check if one of multiple variables is one of many values, you can use a list comprehension and the any() function.