Writings from the author of Automate the Boring Stuff.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
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.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
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.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
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.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
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.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
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.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
Here are 22 actual, runnable Python code for several recursive functions, written in a style to be understandable by beginners and produce debuggable output.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
range() function.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
I created the bitfielddraw Python module so that you could turn math formulas into .png image files.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
itertools module already exists. Includes working code examples.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
In March 2020, just before the lockdowns would begin, I gave the opening keynote at PyTennessee 2020. Unfortunately, it wasn't recorded. But I still have the script I used and so I re-recorded the talk. I've posted it to my YouTube channel.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
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.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
This tutorial teaches you about Pip, a package manager that installs third-party packages for Python.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
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.)
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
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.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
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.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
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.