Learn the basics of Python with these beginner-friendly tutorials
This video tutorial teaches you the basics of using Python’s doctest module for testing your code. This video is based on my article, Python Testing with doctest. Want to learn more Python? Check out some of my Python books on Leanpub, Gumroad, or Amazon.
Intro to Testing Python with doctest (Video) Read More »
This week we welcome Kalob Taulien (@KalobTaulien) as our PyDev of the Week! Kalob is a WagtailCMS core dev, which is a CMS on top of the Django web framework. You can catch up with Kalob by going to his website where you can check out some of Kalob’s bootcamp courses. Let’s spend a few
PyDev of the Week: Kalob Taulien Read More »
Python provides a great module for creating your own iterators. The module I am referring to is itertools. The tools provided by itertools are fast and memory efficient. You will be able to take these building blocks to create your own specialized iterators that can be used for efficient looping. In this article, you will
A Tour of Python’s itertools Library Read More »
Software developers have to work with data. More often than not, the data that you work with will need to be available to multiple developers as well as multiple users at once. The typical solution for this type of situation is to use a database. Databases hold data in a tabular format, which means that
Python 101 – How to Work with a Database Using sqlite3 Read More »
The Python programming language comes with its own built-in Integrated Development Environment (IDE) called IDLE. The name, IDLE, supposedly came from the actor, Eric Idle, who was a part of the Monty Python troupe, which is what Python itself is named after. IDLE comes with Python on Windows and some Linux variants. You may need
An Intro to Python Editors Read More »
There are many common file types that you will need to work with as a software developer. One such format is the CSV file. CSV stands for “Comma-Separated Values” and is a text file format that uses a comma as a delimiter to separate values from one another. Each row is its own record and
Converting CSV to Excel with Python Read More »
Python provides a couple of really nice modules that you can use to craft emails with. They are the email and smtplib modules. Instead of going over various methods in these two modules, you’ll spend some time learning how to actually use these modules. Specifically, you’ll be covering the following: The basics of emailing How
How to Send Emails with Python Read More »
The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain code, equations, visualizations, and formatted text. By default, Jupyter Notebook runs Python out of the box. Additionally, Jupyter Notebook supports many other programming languages via extensions. You can use the Jupyter Notebook for data cleaning and transformation,
Python 101 – An Intro to Jupyter Notebook Read More »
As a developer, there are times where you may end up with two or more dictionaries that you need to combine into one master dictionary. There are lots of different ways to merge dictionaries in the Python programming language. In this tutorial, you will look at a few of the old ways to merge dictionaries
Merging Dictionaries with the Union Operator Read More »
Python came out with a special new keyword several years ago in Python 2.5 that is known as the with statement. This new keyword allows a developer to create context managers. But wait! What’s a context manager? They are handy constructs that allow you to set something up and tear something down automatically. For example,
Python’s with Statement and Context Managers Read More »
In this video tutorial, you will learn about the following: Create dictionaries Access dictionaries Dictionary methods Modifying dictionaries Deleting from your dictionary If you prefer to read your tutorials, then you can check out this one: Python 101 – Learning About Dictionaries
Python 101 – Learning about Dictionaries (Video) Read More »
A set data type is defined as an “unordered collection of distinct hashable objects” according to the Python 3 documentation. You can use a set for membership testing, removing duplicates from a sequence and computing mathematical operations, like intersection, union, difference, and symmetric difference. Due to the fact that they are unordered collections, a set
Python 101: Learning About Sets Read More »
Type checking or hinting is a newer feature of Python that was added in Python 3.5. Type hinting is also known as type annotation. Type hinting is adding special syntax to functions and variable declarations that tell the developer what type the argument or variable is. Python does not enforce the type hints. You can
Type Checking in Python Read More »
Dictionaries are another fundamental data type in Python. A dictionary is a key, value pair. Some programming languages refer to them as hash tables. They are described as a mapping object that maps hashable values to arbitrary objects. A dictionary’s keys must be immutable, that is, unable to change. Starting in Python 3.7, dictionaries are
Python 101 – Learning About Dictionaries Read More »
Tuples are another sequence type in Python. Tuples consist of a number of values that are separated by commas. A tuple is immutable whereas a list is not. Immutable means that the tuple has a fixed value and cannot change. You cannot add, delete or modify items in a tuple. Immutable objects are useful when
Python 101 – Learning About Tuples Read More »