Writings from the author of Automate the Boring Stuff.
Posted by Al Sweigart in news
For the last few months I've been putting together an online course that follows my latest (and free) book, "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python". It is now available.
Posted by Al Sweigart in news
I've written an article for OpenSource.com called APIs, not apps: What the future will be like when everyone can code, where I write about a coming future where programming ability is in the hands of everyone.
Posted by Al Sweigart in programming
Posted by Al Sweigart in news
The 3rd edition of "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" is now available.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
You've written a Python 3 program and want to make it available in other languages. You could duplicate the entire code-base, then go painstakingly through each .py file and replace any text strings you find. Fortunately, Python provides a solution with the gettext module.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
This tutorial teaches how to write a bot that can automatically play the Flash game Sushi Go Round. The concepts in this tutorial can be applied to make bots that play other games as well.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
Text adventures are an old game genre where the entire world is textually described as a series of rooms. Play involves entering simple text commands such as "move north" or "eat pie". Each room in the game world has its own text description, items on the ground, and exits to adjacent rooms.
Posted by Al Sweigart in news
I've organized a large collection of free and non-free books on a new part of this site: The Invent with Python Bookshelf.
Posted by Al Sweigart in news
This blog post is those still new to programming and have probably heard about "object-oriented programming", "OOP", "classes", "inheritance/encapsulation/polymorphism", and other computer science terms but still don't get what exactly OOP is used for. In this post I'll explain why OOP is used and how it makes coding easier.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
IDLE Reimagined is the project name for a redesign for Python's default IDLE editor with focus as an educational tool. IDLE's chief utility is that it comes installed with Python, making it simple for newbies to start programming. But professional software developers don't use IDLE as their IDE. Instead of turning IDLE into a sophisticated IDE for professional software developers, it can be tooled with features specifically to make it friendly to those learning to program.
Posted by Al Sweigart in programming
The geeks have inherited the earth. A couple decades ago if you talked with friends in a chat room, you were cast as a socially-awkward nerd. Doing the same today just means you're a typical Facebook user. Broadband Internet connections and smartphones have taken the Information Age that technically started in the 1970s with PCs and pushed it into daily mainstream life.
Don't get me wrong: You should learn to program. But lost in this hype is a plainspoken reason: NO, SERIOUSLY, WHY SHOULD I LEARN TO CODE?
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
I had the idea to use Google Maps' API to draw out a map of all the Muni routes. This would have the benefit of the system map PDF but also be easier to load and navigate. I have no experience using the Google Maps API and am vaguely aware that there's public data about Muni bus routes, but I'll learn along the way.
Posted by Al Sweigart in programming
HTML is not a programming language. You can't write a "program" that, say, calculates the average of ten numbers with HTML. While some may point out that HTML is a "markup language", this doesn't clarify how that is different from a programming language. This isn't meant to be a thorough argument, but rather a brief explanation that goes just a bit more in detail than "HTML isn't a programming language but instead a markup language."
Posted by Al Sweigart in news
I've created a series of video screencast tutorials for Scratch. Scratch is a block-based programming environment from MIT. It is a programming education toy that is made for kids between the ages of 8 and 16. The screencasts can be found at InventWithScratch.com
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
This tutorial tells you how to write a Python script that can scan Reddit and download images from Imgur submissions you find.
Posted by Al Sweigart in programming
It can be difficult to see how other number systems (such as binary and hexadecimal) work since they have a different amount of numerals than the ten numerals of decimal. But imagine that you are counting in these number systems using an old-fashioned analog odometer that has a different amount of numerals for each digit.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
This is a continuation of Part 1.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
In this blog post, I’m taking a game off of Pygame.org and going through it to make it more readable and extend its functionality.
Posted by Al Sweigart in teaching
Posted by Al Sweigart in programming
A text-style game is a common project for beginner programmers. These can be fun to do, but also require spending time up-front to design it is worthwhile. Before you start designing your own game, look at the design decisions of a few different text-style game genres.