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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Mon 31 October 2022

Installing Brython to Get Python in Your Browser

Posted by Al Sweigart in misc   

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.

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Sun 30 October 2022

17 Online Python IDEs and Interactive Shells/REPLs

Posted by Al Sweigart in misc   

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.

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Sat 29 October 2022

How Computers Store Data with Binary Numbers

Posted by Al Sweigart in misc   

Programming and hacking in movies often involves streams of ones and zeros flowing across the screen. This looks mysterious and impressive, but what do these ones and zeros actually mean? You're probably aware that binary numbers (numbers written using only the two digits, zero and one) have something to do with computers but don't know why.

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