Blog
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Weekly Python Exercise A2 (functions + modules for beginners) closes today
If you are a relative beginner to Python, and want to improve your understanding of functions and modules, then there’s no better way to do so than practice. Weekly Python Exercise provides you with that practice, with a family of six 15-week courses. In each course, you get a question on Tuesday, the answer on…
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“Python Workout” is Manning’s Deal of the Day!
If you’ve just finished a Python course or book, then you might feel a bit nervous about your Python knowledge. You might be wondering how you can become a master Python developer, solving problems without turning to Stack Overflow every few minutes. The good news is that you can improve! But getting better at Python…
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There’s still time to join Weekly Python Exercise
Another cohort of Weekly Python Exercise starts next week! This time, it’s course A2 — for beginners, focusing on functions and modules. Registration closes on Friday. So if you want to level up your Python skills, you should check out, and register with, Weekly Python Exercise sooner rather than later. This cohort of WPE is…
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My interview on the “Talk Python” podcast
I was delighted to appear on the popular “Talk Python to Me” podcast, run by Michael Kennedy. In the podcast, I talk about teaching, learning, and teaching Python to companies. If you’re interested in how to learn better or teach better, then I think you’ll enjoy this episode! The episode is here: https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/210/making-the-most-out-of-in-person-training
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Making your Python decorators even better, with functool.wraps
Summary: Decorate your inner wrapper function with @wraps(func), imported from functools, and the decorated function keeps its original name, docstring, and signature. Without it, help() and name report “wrapper” and a generic (*args, **kwargs) signature. It’s one line of code, and I recommend adding it to every decorator you write. The good news: I gave…
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Get code + slides from my “Practical Decorators” talk from Euro Python / PyCon 2019
I presented my “Practical Decorators” talk twice this year — once at PyCon 2019 in Cleveland, and again at EuroPython 2019 in Basel. Here is the video of my presentation in Cleveland: If you want to get the PDF of my slides, as well as the Python code that I showed, then just enter your…
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Announcing: Weekly Python Exercise A2 — functions and modules for Python beginners
I spend just about every day teaching Python to people at companies around the world. I’m always amazed to see just how popular Python is, and how many people are using it — and in how many ways they are using it. But I’m also amazed by how many people are just “getting by” with…
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Improve your Python skills with my new book: Python Workout
A few years ago, I noticed that many of the participants in my corporate Python courses were asking the same question: How can I get additional practice? And I have to say, this question made a lot of sense. After all, you can only absorb so much information from a course, regardless of how good…
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Announcing: My new NumPy course is live!
Guess what? Python is the #1 language for data science. I know, it doesn’t seem like this should be true. Python is a great language, and easy to learn, but it’s not the most efficient language, either in execution speed or in its memory usage. That’s where NumPy comes in: NumPy lets you have the…
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Python’s “else” clause for loops
Let’s say that we have a list of tuples, with each tuple containing some numbers. For example: >>> mylist = [(3,5), (2,4,6,8), (4,10, 17), (15, 14, 11), (3,3,2)] I want to write a program that asks the user to enter a number. If one of the tuples adds up to the user’s input, we’ll print…