Tue 20 February 2024

Make Lively Movement Animation with PyTweening's Tweening Functions

Posted by Al Sweigart in misc   

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.

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Thu 15 June 2023

Using ChatGPT-4 to Review My Recursion Programming Book

Posted by Al Sweigart in misc   

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.

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Tue 28 March 2023

Book Review: Python Distilled

Posted by Al Sweigart in misc   

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.

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Sat 19 November 2022

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

Posted by Al Sweigart in misc   

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.

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