Blog
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Announcing a new course: Intro Python — Fundamentals
Python is one of the hottest languages out there. People can’t get enough Python, and companies can’t get enough Python people. This means that learning Python is a great move for your career. (Also, it’s just plain ol’ fun to use.) If you’ve always wanted to get started with Python, or if you’ve been using…
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The foreigner’s guide to phone (WeChat + AliPay) payments in China
[Construction notice: I’m rewriting this article to reflect the (bad) situation for foreigners using WeChat, and the (amazingly good) situation for foreigners using AliPay. I hope that the rewrite will be done by soon, but covid-19 has made my schedule even more unpredictable than before. My apologies for the verbal dust that’ll be around until…
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Announcing: Two Python courses in Tel Aviv
Good news for developers in Israel — I’ll be offering two open-enrollment courses in Tel Aviv next month (January): Advanced Python: If you’ve already been using Python for at least six months, and want to level up your knowledge of this hot language, then this course is for you. I’ll talk about advanced data structures,…
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Announcing: Weekly Python Exercise, Newbie Edition
Are you new to Python, and looking for relatively easy exercises to reinforce what you’ve learned? Do you use Python every day, but rely on Stack Overflow to answer questions like, “Which parentheses should I use here,” or, “What’s the difference between a list and dict?” Are you an experienced developer in other languages, and…
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Last chance to save 40% on Python and Git courses
Today (Monday) is the last day to benefit from my weekend sale, with 40% off of my books and courses! Just enter the coupon code “BF2018” for any product , and take 40% off. This offer includes my new “Intro Python: Fundamentals” course, containing the 1st day of the 4-day training I give to experienced…
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Black Friday sale — improve your Python + Git for 40% off!
Yup — just like everyone else, I’m having a Black Friday sale on all of my online books and courses. Just this weekend, you can use the coupon code BF2018 to improve your Python skills: Object-Oriented Python Understanding and Mastering Git Comprehending Comprehensions Practice Makes Python, complete edition Practice Makes Python, just the book Practice…
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Last chance: Weekly Python Exercise registration closes soon
You probably want to understand Python better, use it more efficiently, and write code that you (and others) can maintain — for yourself, your current job, and your career. Weekly Python Exercise lets you make that improvement. Over the course of a year, you learn to solve more interesting, useful, and complex problems. You’ll learn…
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Weekly Python Exercise: Registration closes in two days
This is just a reminder that registration for the next cohort of Weekly Python Exercise, my course that combines exercises and community to turn you into an advanced Python developer, closes in just two days, on September 18th. If you’ve always wanted to improve your understanding of such topics as functions, objects, decorators, generators, comprehensions,…
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Announcing: Weekly Python Exercise, Autumn 2018 cohort
Just about every day for the last decade, I’ve taught Python to developers at companies around the world. And if there’s anything that those developers want, it’s to improve their Python fluency. Being a more fluent Python developer doesn’t only mean being able to solve problems faster and better — although these are nice benefits,…
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Avoiding Windows backslash problems with Python’s raw strings
In short: Put an r before the opening quote: r’c:\abc\def\ghi.txt’. In a raw string, every backslash stays a literal backslash, so Windows paths don’t get mangled by escape codes like \a, \f, or \n. Doubling each backslash works too, but raw strings save you from remembering which letters are special. I’m a Unix guy, but…