If you like my programming books, here's a few more resources you can use to get into video game development.

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You don't need to buy a new computer to learn programming. It's a common misconception that you need a powerful computer to program. This guide will give you some hints to guide you in the right direction.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.^*

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

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Generators in Python (also called generator functions) are used to create a series of values one at a time. Let's learn how they work by re-creating the built-in range() function.

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This post has the Python code for the infamously recursive Ackermann function, but without using recursion.

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The source code and compiled binary for a Windows terminal command I created to copy the current working directory to the clipboard. I find myself using this all the time.

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

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The Charisma Machine by Morgan G. Ames is the cautionary tale everyone in tech should read. Five stars.

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Explores the difference between combinations and permutations, and why you don't need to write your own Python code for them because the built-in itertools module already exists. Includes working code examples.

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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.

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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.

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I've started a new video series of me silently coding a small game project from scratch. The Calm Programming series are meant to be coding videos that you can watch while playing the music of your choice. They aren't quite the same as tutorials: they don't have screen capture and aren't narrated, though you can turn on captions for some explanations.

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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.

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