Writings from the author of Automate the Boring Stuff.
Posted by Al Sweigart in programming
Math and programming have a somewhat misunderstood relationship. Many people think that you have to be good at math or made good grades in math class before you can even begin to learn programming. But how much math does a person need to know in order to program?
Posted by Al Sweigart in programming
They don’t want to learn how to program just for the sake of programming. They don’t want to learn about algorithm complexity or implicit casting. They want to make Super Mario or Twitter or Angry Birds.
Posted by Al Sweigart in programming
Posted by Al Sweigart in news
I've completed my next book, which focuses on the Pygame library and making graphical games in Python.
Posted by Al Sweigart in news
Download pyganim.py and example programs. (Works on both Python 2 and 3.)
Details at http://inventwithpython.com/pyganim/
Pyganim is a module that you can import into your Pygame games to handle sprite animation.
Posted by Al Sweigart in python
IDLE is great, but over time I’ve noticed a lot of problems with IDLE that I wish someone would fix.
Posted by Al Sweigart in pygame
Here are a couple games I wrote. The first was so popular that I made a sequel.
Posted by Al Sweigart in news
Here's the introductory chapter to my next book on Python and Pygame. It assumes you have some Python and programming experience (if you don't, give a look to Invent with Python), and offers a quick view of all of the major parts of Pygame.
Posted by Al Sweigart in news
Yuanle Qiu has started translating the "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" into Chinese.
Posted by Al Sweigart in pygame
If you already know a bit of programming and Python, and want to get up to speed on the Pygame 2D game framework, here's a cheat sheet that you can look over. It implements a very short Pygame program covering most of Pygame's basic features.
Posted by Al Sweigart in programming
I wrote some programs to go through 6 GB of OpenStreetMap data from http://metro.teczno.com so that I could extract a list of street names for an upcoming game project. The game will use procedural generation to create cities, so I need to have a dataset of street names but couldn't easily find one. So I've created this one and wanted to share it.
Posted by Al Sweigart in news
I've created a web version of the Caesar Cipher wheel using JQuery and CSS sprites.
Posted by Al Sweigart in pygame
The Caesar Cipher Wheel is a paper cutout that can be used to perform encryption and decryption in the Caesar Cipher. However, if you don't have a printer but do have Python and Pygame installed, you can use this Caesar Cipher Wheel program to rotate a virtual cipher disk instead.
Posted by Al Sweigart in pygame
Draw out horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines in the same directions that the dot moves. The pattern of the dot's movement becomes longer and longer.
Posted by Al Sweigart in pygame
Pygcurse (pronounced "pig curse") is a curses library emulator that runs on top of the Pygame framework. It provides an easy way to create text adventures, roguelikes, and console-style applications. The mascot of Pygcurse is a blue pig with a skull tattoo on its butt.
Posted by Al Sweigart in news
I've decided to make the incomplete rough drafts of my next two Python books available.
Become a Codebreaker with Python
Making Graphical Games with Pygame
The emphasis is on "rough" and "incomplete", but I thought it would be better to give a preview of the direction I was going. These books are also available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license like the first "Invent with Python" book.
Posted by Al Sweigart in programming
This is a mistake a lot of new programmers make. The coder comes up with some clever trick or that can save a few bytes of memory or shave a few nanoseconds off of a function. You must learn that these "clever tricks" aren't really worth it.
Posted by Al Sweigart in programming
This is a programming tutorial for beginner and intermediate programmers who want to learn what recursion is. The programming language used for the examples is Python, but you can probably follow along if you know programming in some other language such as PHP or JavaScript.
Posted by Al Sweigart in pygame
Here's the source code for a Bejeweled clone called Gemgem, written in Python with Pygame.
Posted by Al Sweigart in pygame
Here's a Sokoban ("box pusher") clone called Star Pusher. I've used the graphics from the Planet Cute collection. You'll need Python (2 or 3) and Pygame installed to run it. Just download and unzip the files to the same directory. It comes with 201 levels from David W. Skinner.