Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
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.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
This page has materials for folks taking my two-hour tutorial, A Beginner's Guide to Tackling Recursion at PyOhio 2018 or following its video recording.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
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.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
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.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
Before we can get a nuanced answer to "Are tuples mutable or immutable?", we need some background information.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
I often get emails say little more than "Why doesn't my program work?" Often I can't answer them; either I don't have enough information about your problem or you're asking me about something I don't know anything about.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
This post contains the lessons I've learned and my process for creating video tutorials, and I hope others who want to do the same find it useful. While this post is specific to Udemy and programming courses, the same lessons probably apply to all online courses.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
Django is a web app framework for Python (similar to Rails for Ruby). It implements common web app features so you don't have to write that code. Dreamhost is a web host that offers cheap but reliable web servers. Their shared hosting plan is $11 a month, and provides more than enough disk space and bandwidth for personal sites.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
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 misc
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.