As an instructor, environment setup is a tough hurdle for students to clear so they can start learning to program. You could use an online Python IDE or set up Brython to run Python in your browser. Installing a complete IDE like PyCharm or Microsoft Visual Studio Code is also an option, but these IDEs have complicated-looking user interfaces that can be intimidating. Using IDLE (which comes with Python) or the command-line interactive shell can make the first few steps of programming less intmidating. However, running pip from the command-line has several problems itself. To solve this, I created the pipfromrepl module.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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

Read more...

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

Read more...

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.

Read more...

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

Here are 22 actual, runnable Python code for several recursive functions, written in a style to be understandable by beginners and produce debuggable output.

Read more...

Read more...

Read more...

I created the bitfielddraw Python module so that you could turn math formulas into .png image files.

Read more...