Writings from the author of Automate the Boring Stuff.
Mon 11 January 2021 Al Sweigart
Extracting text as string values from images is called optical character recognition (OCR) or simply text recognition. This blog post tells you how to run the Tesseract OCR engine from Python. Includes working code examples.
Mon 11 January 2021 Al Sweigart
This tutorial teaches you about Pip, a package manager that installs third-party packages for Python.
Thu 24 December 2020 Al Sweigart
Fri 18 September 2020 Al Sweigart
watch "git status" in one and watch "git log -oneline" in the other so you can get live feedback as you enter Git commands.
Thu 26 March 2020 Al Sweigart
Information about how to sign up for my Python course on Udemy for free or at a discounted rate.
Tue 31 December 2019 Al Sweigart
Sun 24 November 2019 Al Sweigart
A quick guide to using type hints in Python.
Tue 12 November 2019 Al Sweigart
5 Stars: An excellent project-based book for young readers who want to move beyond Scratch
Code This Game is an excellent book that teaches Python programming by guiding the reader through making a tower-defense game from scratch. This is a book that doesn't shy away from programming detail, but manages to remain fun and engaging. If you have a student or child who wants to move beyond MIT's Scratch programming tool and do "real" programming, this is a great book.
Sun 20 October 2019 Al Sweigart
Mon 07 October 2019 Al Sweigart
Here are all the new additions and updates in the second edition.
Thu 15 August 2019 Al Sweigart
Wed 05 June 2019 Al Sweigart
Fri 01 February 2019 Al Sweigart
A recent post to Reddit sparked some comments, so I wanted to clarify: In Python, hashable objects must be immutable and mutable objects cannot be hashable. (With one exception.)
Sun 09 December 2018 Al Sweigart
Alternative Title: The Little Schemer Wears No Clothes
Perhaps a software engineer or MIT professor friend of yours recommended this book to you. “Oh, you want to learn how to code? You should read The Little Schemer,” they’ll say. Your friend means well, but is completely wrong to recommend this book.
Mon 22 October 2018 Al Sweigart
Python's packaging ecosystem contains multitudes. It can be intimidating for new Python developers to try to crack into, especially given the rapid evolution of Python packaging. Writing a *helloworld.py* file and running it on your computer is simple, but getting it to run on someone else's computer (and doing this the "right" way) involves a tangle of terms, tools, and techniques. What are wheel files? What is distutils? Do I use distutils or easy_install or pip?
To get to the bottom of this myself, I've compiled a curriculum of PyCon talks, online documentation, and my own personal notes to finally get a complete handle on Python packaging.
Wed 17 October 2018 Al Sweigart
Programming games are a games genre where instead of playing the game directly, players write bot programs to play the game autonomously. I've created a Zombie Dice simulator, allowing programmers to practice their skills while having fun making game-playing AIs. Zombie Dice bots can be simple or incredibly complex, and are great for a class exercise or an individual programming challenge.
Fri 24 August 2018 Al Sweigart
This page has materials for folks taking my two-hour tutorial, A Beginner's Guide to Tackling Recursion at PyOhio 2018 or following its video recording.
Fri 17 August 2018 Al Sweigart
The Zen of Python by Tim Peters are 20 guidelines for the design of the Python language. Your Python code doesn’t necessarily have to follow these guidelines, but they’re good to keep in mind. The Zen of Python is an Easter egg, or hidden joke, that appears if you run import this.
Mon 21 May 2018 Al Sweigart
In Python, you can increase the value of a variable by 1 or reduce it by 1 using the augmented assignment operators. The code spam += 1 and spam -= 1 increments and decrements the numeric values in spam by 1, respectively.
Other languages such as C++ and Java have the ++ and -- operators for incrementing and decrementing variables. (The name of C++ itself reflects this; the name is a tongue-in-cheek joke that indicates it's an enhanced form of the C language.) Code in C++ and Java could have ++spam or spam++. Python wisely doesn't include these operators; they are notoriously susceptible to subtle bugs.
Mon 05 February 2018 Al Sweigart
Before we can get a nuanced answer to "Are tuples mutable or immutable?", we need some background information.