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.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
The 3rd edition of "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" is now available.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
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 misc
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 misc
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 misc
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 misc
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.