Tips for writing better Python code
I was a very experienced programmer when I started using Python. So I wrote some very bad Python code. Each language has its own way of doing things. The more you learn the language,...
Category: Article
Becoming a Python trainer
I’ve been ‘lucky’ enough to get a steady stream of Python training assignments. ‘Lucky’ in the sense of ‘where opportunity meets preparation’. Recently I had a long message from a fellow Python developer on...
Control your computer using Python
Python is an excellent language for taking control of your computer and performing some of the more tedious tasks. I recently used it to automate how I create Python training videos and have just...
A simple GUI (graphical user interface)
Python is an easy-to-learn yet powerful language, and comes with a wealth of libraries. It is often used to create simple scripts. You run these on the command line, giving it any parameters it...
Take out your turtle for a recursive walk
Python is a simple but powerful language, and comes with a wealth of libraries. It took just 10 lines of code and the Turtle library to create the black line in the image above....
A simple plot with Python and Bokeh
Python is a simple but powerful language, and comes with a wealth of libraries. The chart above took just 9 lines of Python. All the hard work is done by the Bokeh library. It...
Use Python to update a spreadsheet
How would you like to grab a share price daily and store it in a spreadsheet? Or add a new column to dozens of spreadsheets – automatically? Python is a simple but powerful language,...
Fractions in Python
When you ask your spreadsheet to calculate 1/2 + 1/3 you get something like this: This is obviously an approximation. The 3’s after the decimal point repeat indefinitely. The correct answer is: 1/2 =...
Retrieve and display a data set
(First part of the “Practical Python in 10 lines or less” series) Python is a simple but powerful language, and comes with a wealth of libraries. The chart above took just 10 lines of...
Getting started with Python for Scientific Computing
So you’d like to do some data analysis or other scientific computer with Python. How do you start? The Anaconda distribution A Python ‘distribution’ is a bundle of Python goodies, typically Python itself, a...