Writings from the author of Automate the Boring Stuff.
Fri 02 February 2018 Al Sweigart
I often get emails say little more than "Why doesn't my program work?" Often I can't answer them; either I don't have enough information about your problem or you're asking me about something I don't know anything about.
Wed 05 April 2017 Al Sweigart
This post contains the lessons I've learned and my process for creating video tutorials, and I hope others who want to do the same find it useful. While this post is specific to Udemy and programming courses, the same lessons probably apply to all online courses.
Tue 14 March 2017 Al Sweigart
Django is a web app framework for Python (similar to Rails for Ruby). It implements common web app features so you don't have to write that code. Dreamhost is a web host that offers cheap but reliable web servers. Their shared hosting plan is $11 a month, and provides more than enough disk space and bandwidth for personal sites.
Mon 21 September 2015 Al Sweigart
For the last few months I've been putting together an online course that follows my latest (and free) book, "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python". It is now available.
Tue 15 September 2015 Al Sweigart
I've written an article for OpenSource.com called APIs, not apps: What the future will be like when everyone can code, where I write about a coming future where programming ability is in the hands of everyone.
Tue 01 September 2015 Al Sweigart
Tue 10 March 2015 Al Sweigart
The 3rd edition of "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" is now available.
Sat 20 December 2014 Al Sweigart
You've written a Python 3 program and want to make it available in other languages. You could duplicate the entire code-base, then go painstakingly through each .py file and replace any text strings you find. Fortunately, Python provides a solution with the gettext module.
Wed 17 December 2014 Al Sweigart
This tutorial teaches how to write a bot that can automatically play the Flash game Sushi Go Round. The concepts in this tutorial can be applied to make bots that play other games as well.
Thu 11 December 2014 Al Sweigart
Text adventures are an old game genre where the entire world is textually described as a series of rooms. Play involves entering simple text commands such as "move north" or "eat pie". Each room in the game world has its own text description, items on the ground, and exits to adjacent rooms.
Sat 06 December 2014 Al Sweigart
I've organized a large collection of free and non-free books on a new part of this site: The Invent with Python Bookshelf.
Tue 02 December 2014 Al Sweigart
This blog post is those still new to programming and have probably heard about "object-oriented programming", "OOP", "classes", "inheritance/encapsulation/polymorphism", and other computer science terms but still don't get what exactly OOP is used for. In this post I'll explain why OOP is used and how it makes coding easier.
Thu 20 November 2014 Al Sweigart
IDLE Reimagined is the project name for a redesign for Python's default IDLE editor with focus as an educational tool. IDLE's chief utility is that it comes installed with Python, making it simple for newbies to start programming. But professional software developers don't use IDLE as their IDE. Instead of turning IDLE into a sophisticated IDE for professional software developers, it can be tooled with features specifically to make it friendly to those learning to program.
Tue 30 September 2014 Al Sweigart
The geeks have inherited the earth. A couple decades ago if you talked with friends in a chat room, you were cast as a socially-awkward nerd. Doing the same today just means you're a typical Facebook user. Broadband Internet connections and smartphones have taken the Information Age that technically started in the 1970s with PCs and pushed it into daily mainstream life.
Don't get me wrong: You should learn to program. But lost in this hype is a plainspoken reason: NO, SERIOUSLY, WHY SHOULD I LEARN TO CODE?
Tue 11 February 2014 Al Sweigart
I had the idea to use Google Maps' API to draw out a map of all the Muni routes. This would have the benefit of the system map PDF but also be easier to load and navigate. I have no experience using the Google Maps API and am vaguely aware that there's public data about Muni bus routes, but I'll learn along the way.
Sun 15 December 2013 Al Sweigart
HTML is not a programming language. You can't write a "program" that, say, calculates the average of ten numbers with HTML. While some may point out that HTML is a "markup language", this doesn't clarify how that is different from a programming language. This isn't meant to be a thorough argument, but rather a brief explanation that goes just a bit more in detail than "HTML isn't a programming language but instead a markup language."
Wed 02 October 2013 Al Sweigart
I've created a series of video screencast tutorials for Scratch. Scratch is a block-based programming environment from MIT. It is a programming education toy that is made for kids between the ages of 8 and 16. The screencasts can be found at InventWithScratch.com
Mon 30 September 2013 Al Sweigart
This tutorial tells you how to write a Python script that can scan Reddit and download images from Imgur submissions you find.
Thu 20 June 2013 Al Sweigart
It can be difficult to see how other number systems (such as binary and hexadecimal) work since they have a different amount of numerals than the ten numerals of decimal. But imagine that you are counting in these number systems using an old-fashioned analog odometer that has a different amount of numerals for each digit.
Thu 13 June 2013 Al Sweigart
This is a continuation of Part 1.