Writings from the author of Automate the Boring Stuff.
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 programming
Here's a hint for programmers writing their resumes: "JavaScript" is spelled as one word, capital-J, capital-S, and no hyphen. But this isn't a blog post about programmers who make typos on their resumes, but about what a minefield of low-quality programming books that Amazon has become.
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 programming
I was one of those kids in the 90s who taught themselves how to code by making video games in the BASIC programming language. Later, I majored in computer science, moved to Silicon Valley, became a software engineer, started writing programming books including Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, and then quit my job to write full-time. I now wake up whenever I want and work from home or nearby cafes. I'm financially secure while being my own boss.
This is a completely true story.*
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 programming
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 programming
The Charisma Machine by Morgan G. Ames is the cautionary tale everyone in tech should read. Five stars.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
itertools module already exists. Includes working code examples.
Posted by Al Sweigart in news
My new book, The Big Book of Small Python Projects, is now available from No Starch Press. It's free to read online under a Creative Commons license. This book contains 81 small but complete programming projects written in Python. These projects are designed to help new programmers who have learned the basics see what real programs "look like". These aren't code snippets, but actual, full programs that you can run. At the same time, they are small enough so that their source code is easy to understand.
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 programming
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 programming
Posted by Al Sweigart in programming
watch "git status" in one and watch "git log -oneline" in the other so you can get live feedback as you enter Git commands.