The Invent with Python Blog

Writings from the author of Automate the Boring Stuff.




Tue 12 November 2019

Book Review: Code This Game! by Meg Ray (Odd Dot 2019)

Posted by Al Sweigart in programming   

5 Stars: An excellent project-based book for young readers who want to move beyond Scratch

Code This Game is an excellent book that teaches Python programming by guiding the reader through making a tower-defense game from scratch. This is a book that doesn't shy away from programming detail, but manages to remain fun and engaging. If you have a student or child who wants to move beyond MIT's Scratch programming tool and do "real" programming, this is a great book.

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Wed 05 June 2019

Pythonic Ways to Use Dictionaries

Posted by Al Sweigart in python   

Python dictionaries are a useful part of the language. In addition to having the ability to store keys and values, you can also use dictionary methods to manipulate those values, and you can use dictionaries to write more concise code.

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Sun 09 December 2018

Book Review: The Little Schemer

Posted by Al Sweigart in programming   

Alternative Title: The Little Schemer Wears No Clothes

Perhaps a software engineer or MIT professor friend of yours recommended this book to you. “Oh, you want to learn how to code? You should read The Little Schemer,” they’ll say. Your friend means well, but is completely wrong to recommend this book.

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Mon 22 October 2018

A Curriculum for Python Packaging

Posted by Al Sweigart in python   

Python's packaging ecosystem contains multitudes. It can be intimidating for new Python developers to try to crack into, especially given the rapid evolution of Python packaging. Writing a *helloworld.py* file and running it on your computer is simple, but getting it to run on someone else's computer (and doing this the "right" way) involves a tangle of terms, tools, and techniques. What are wheel files? What is distutils? Do I use distutils or easy_install or pip?

To get to the bottom of this myself, I've compiled a curriculum of PyCon talks, online documentation, and my own personal notes to finally get a complete handle on Python packaging.

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Wed 17 October 2018

Writing Bots to Play Zombie Dice

Posted by Al Sweigart in python   

Programming games are a games genre where instead of playing the game directly, players write bot programs to play the game autonomously. I've created a Zombie Dice simulator, allowing programmers to practice their skills while having fun making game-playing AIs. Zombie Dice bots can be simple or incredibly complex, and are great for a class exercise or an individual programming challenge.

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Fri 17 August 2018

The Zen of Python, Explained

Posted by Al Sweigart in python   

The Zen of Python by Tim Peters are 20 guidelines for the design of the Python language. Your Python code doesn’t necessarily have to follow these guidelines, but they’re good to keep in mind. The Zen of Python is an Easter egg, or hidden joke, that appears if you run import this.

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Mon 21 May 2018

Python's Fake Increment and Decrement Operators

Posted by Al Sweigart in python   

In Python, you can increase the value of a variable by 1 or reduce it by 1 using the augmented assignment operators. The code spam += 1 and spam -= 1 increments and decrements the numeric values in spam by 1, respectively.

Other languages such as C++ and Java have the ++ and -- operators for incrementing and decrementing variables. (The name of C++ itself reflects this; the name is a tongue-in-cheek joke that indicates it's an enhanced form of the C language.) Code in C++ and Java could have ++spam or spam++. Python wisely doesn't include these operators; they are notoriously susceptible to subtle bugs.

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