Tiny Python Projects : Learn Coding and Testing with Puzzles and Games

Tiny Python Projects takes you from amateur to Pythonista as you create 22 bitesize programs. Each tiny project teaches you a new programming concept, from the basics of lists and strings right through to regular expressions and randomness. Summary A long journey is really a lot of little steps. The same is true when you’re learning Python, so you may as well have some fun along the way! Written in a lighthearted style with entertaining exercises that build powerful skills, Tiny Python Projects takes you from amateur to Pythonista as you create 22 bitesize programs. Each tiny project teaches you a new programming concept, from the basics of lists and strings right through to regular expressions and randomness. Along the way you’ll also discover how testing can make you a better programmer in any language. About the technology Who says learning to program has to be boring? The 21 activities in this book teach Python fundamentals through puzzles and games. Not only will you be entertained with every exercise, but you’ll learn about text manipulation, basic algorithms, and lists and dictionaries as you go. It’s the ideal way for any Python newbie to gain confidence and experience. About the book The projects are tiny, but the rewards are big: each chapter in Tiny Python Projects challenges you with a new Python program, including a password creator, a word rhymer, and a Shakespearean insult generator. As you complete these entertaining exercises, you’ll graduate from a Python beginner to a confident programmer—and you’ll have a good time doing it! What's inside • Write command-line Python programs • Manipulate Python data structures • Use and control randomness • Write and run tests for programs and functions • Download testing suites for each project About the reader For readers with beginner programming skills. About the author Ken Youens-Clark is a Senior Scientific Programmer at the University of Arizona. He has an MS in Biosystems Engineering and has been programming for over 20 years. Tiny Python Projects brief contents contents preface Why write Python? Why did I write this book? acknowledgments about this book Who should read this book How this book is organized: A roadmap About the code Software/hardware requirements iiveBook discussion forum Other online resources about the author about the cover Getting started: Introduction and installation guide Writing command-line programs Using test-driven development Setting up your environment Code examples Getting the code Installing modules Code formatters Code linters How to start writing new programs Why not Notebooks? The scope of topics we’ll cover Why not object-oriented programming? A note about the lingo 1 How to write and test a Python program 1.1 Creating your first program 1.2 Comment lines 1.3 Testing your program 1.4 Adding the #! (shebang) line 1.5 Making a program executable 1.6 Understanding $PATH 1.6.1 Altering your $PATH 1.7 Adding a parameter and help 1.8 Making the argument optional 1.9 Running our tests 1.10 Adding the main() function 1.11 Adding the get_args() function 1.11.1 Checking style and errors 1.12 Testing hello.py 1.13 Starting a new program with new.py 1.14 Using template.py as an alternative to new.py Summary 2 The crow’s nest: Working with strings 2.1 Getting started 2.1.1 How to use the tests 2.1.2 Creating programs with new.py 2.1.3 Write, test, repeat 2.1.4 Defining your arguments 2.1.5 Concatenating strings 2.1.6 Variable types 2.1.7 Getting just part of a string 2.1.8 Finding help in the REPL 2.1.9 String methods 2.1.10 String comparisons 2.1.11 Conditional branching 2.1.12 String formatting 2.1.13 Time to write 2.2 Solution 2.3 Discussion 2.3.1 Defining the arguments with get_args() 2.3.2 The main() thing 2.3.3 Classifying the first character of a word 2.3.4 Printing the results 2.3.5 Running the test suite 2.4 Going further Summary 3 Going on a picnic: Working with lists 3.1 Starting the program 3.2 Writing picnic.py 3.3 Introducing lists 3.3.1 Adding one element to a list 3.3.2 Adding many elements to a list 3.3.3 Indexing lists 3.3.4 Slicing lists 3.3.5 Finding elements in a list 3.3.6 Removing elements from a list 3.3.7 Sorting and reversing a list 3.3.8 Lists are mutable 3.3.9 Joining a list 3.4 Conditional branching with if/elif/else 3.4.1 Time to write 3.5 Solution 3.6 Discussion 3.6.1 Defining the arguments 3.6.2 Assigning and sorting the items 3.6.3 Formatting the items 3.6.4 Printing the items 3.7 Going further Summary 4 Jump the Five: Working with dictionaries 4.1 Dictionaries 4.1.1 Creating a dictionary 4.1.2 Accessing dictionary values 4.1.3 Other dictionary methods 4.2 Writing jump.py 4.3 Solution 4.4 Discussion 4.4.1 Defining the parameters 4.4.2 Using a dict for encoding 4.4.3 Various ways to process items in a series 4.4.4 (Not) using str.replace() 4.5 Going further Summary 5 Howler: Working with files and STDOUT 5.1 Reading files 5.2 Writing files 5.3 Writing howler.py 5.4 Solution 5.5 Discussion 5.5.1 Defining the arguments 5.5.2 Reading input from a file or the command line 5.5.3 Choosing the output file handle 5.5.4 Printing the output 5.5.5 A low-memory version 5.6 Going further Summary 6 Words count: Reading files and STDIN, iterating lists, formatting strings 6.1 Writing wc.py 6.1.1 Defining file inputs 6.1.2 Iterating lists 6.1.3 What you’re counting 6.1.4 Formatting your results 6.2 Solution 6.3 Discussion 6.3.1 Defining the arguments 6.3.2 Reading a file using a for loop 6.4 Going further Summary 7 Gashlycrumb: Looking items up in a dictionary 7.1 Writing gashlycrumb.py 7.2 Solution 7.3 Discussion 7.3.1 Handling the arguments 7.3.2 Reading the input file 7.3.3 Using a dictionary comprehension 7.3.4 Dictionary lookups 7.4 Going further Summary 8 Apples and Bananas: Find and replace 8.1 Altering strings 8.1.1 Using the str.replace() method 8.1.2 Using str.translate() 8.1.3 Other ways to mutate strings 8.2 Solution 8.3 Discussion 8.3.1 Defining the parameters 8.3.2 Eight ways to replace the vowels 8.4 Refactoring with tests 8.5 Going further Summary 9 Dial-a-Curse: Generating random insults from lists of words 9.1 Writing abuse.py 9.1.1 Validating arguments 9.1.2 Importing and seeding the random module 9.1.3 Defining the adjectives and nouns 9.1.4 Taking random samples and choices 9.1.5 Formatting the output 9.2 Solution 9.3 Discussion 9.3.1 Defining the arguments 9.3.2 Using parser.error() 9.3.3 Program exit values and STDERR 9.3.4 Controlling randomness with random.seed() 9.3.5 Iterating with range() and using throwaway variables 9.3.6 Constructing the insults 9.4 Going further Summary 10 Telephone: Randomly mutating strings 10.1 Writing telephone.py 10.1.1 Calculating the number of mutations 10.1.2 The mutation space 10.1.3 Selecting the characters to mutate 10.1.4 Mutating a string 10.1.5 Time to write 10.2 Solution 10.3 Discussion 10.3.1 Mutating a string 10.3.2 Using a list instead of a str 10.4 Going further Summary 11 Bottles of Beer Song: Writing and testing functions 11.1 Writing bottles.py 11.1.1 Counting down 11.1.2 Writing a function 11.1.3 Writing a test for verse() 11.1.4 Using the verse() function 11.2 Solution 11.3 Discussion 11.3.1 Counting down 11.3.2 Test-driven development 11.3.3 The verse() function 11.3.4 Iterating through the verses 11.3.5 1,500 other solutions 11.4 Going further Summary 12 Ransom: Randomly capitalizing text 12.1 Writing ransom.py 12.1.1 Mutating the text 12.1.2 Flipping a coin 12.1.3 Creating a new string 12.2 Solution 12.3 Discussion 12.3.1 Iterating through elements in a sequence 12.3.2 Writing a function to choose the letter 12.3.3 Another way to write list.append() 12.3.4 Using a str instead of a list 12.3.5 Using a list comprehension 12.3.6 Using a map() function 12.4 Comparing methods 12.5 Going further Summary 13 Twelve Days of Christmas: Algorithm design 13.1 Writing twelve_days.py 13.1.1 Counting 13.1.2 Creating the ordinal value 13.1.3 Making the verses 13.1.4 Using the verse() function 13.1.5 Printing 13.1.6 Time to write 13.2 Solution 13.3 Discussion 13.3.1 Making one verse 13.3.2 Generating the verses 13.3.3 Printing the verses 13.4 Going further Summary 14 Rhymer: Using regular expressions to create rhyming words 14.1 Writing rhymer.py 14.1.1 Breaking a word 14.1.2 Using regular expressions 14.1.3 Using capture groups 14.1.4 Truthiness 14.1.5 Creating the output 14.2 Solution 14.3 Discussion 14.3.1 Stemming a word 14.3.2 Formatting and commenting the regular expression 14.3.3 Using the stemmer() function outside your program 14.3.4 Creating rhyming strings 14.3.5 Writing stemmer() without regular expressions 14.4 Going further Summary 15 The Kentucky Friar: More regular expressions 15.1 Writing friar.py 15.1.1 Splitting text using regular expressions 15.1.2 Shorthand classes 15.1.3 Negated shorthand classes 15.1.4 Using re.split() with a captured regex 15.1.5 Writing the fry() function 15.1.6 Using the fry() function 15.2 Solution 15.3 Discussion 15.3.1 Writing the fry() function manually 15.3.2 Writing the fry() function with regular expressions 15.4 Going further Summary 16 The scrambler: Randomly reordering the middles of words 16.1 Writing scrambler.py 16.1.1 Breaking the text into lines and words 16.1.2 Capturing, non-capturing, and optional groups 16.1.3 Compiling a regex 16.1.4 Scrambling a word 16.1.5 Scrambling all the words 16.2 Solution 16.3 Discussion 16.3.1 Processing the text 16.3.2 Scrambling a word 16.4 Going further Summary 17 Mad Libs: Using regular expressions 17.1 Writing mad.py 17.1.1 Using regular expressions to find the pointy bits 17.1.2 Halting and printing errors 17.1.3 Getting the values 17.1.4 Substituting the text 17.2 Solution 17.3 Discussion 17.3.1 Substituting with regular expressions 17.3.2 Finding the placeholders without regular expressions 17.4 Going further Summary 18 Gematria: Numeric encoding of text using ASCII values 18.1 Writing gematria.py 18.1.1 Cleaning a word 18.1.2 Ordinal character values and ranges 18.1.3 Summing and reducing 18.1.4 Using functools.reduce 18.1.5 Encoding the words 18.1.6 Breaking the text 18.2 Solution 18.3 Discussion 18.3.1 Writing word2num() 18.3.2 Sorting 18.3.3 Testing 18.4 Going further Summary 19 Workout of the Day: Parsing CSV files, creating text table output 19.1 Writing wod.py 19.1.1 Reading delimited text files 19.1.2 Manually reading a CSV file 19.1.3 Parsing with the csv module 19.1.4 Creating a function to read a CSV file 19.1.5 Selecting the exercises 19.1.6 Formatting the output 19.1.7 Handling bad data 19.1.8 Time to write 19.2 Solution 19.3 Discussion 19.3.1 Reading a CSV file 19.3.2 Potential runtime errors 19.3.3 Using pandas.read_csv() to parse the file 19.3.4 Formatting the table 19.4 Going further Summary 20 Password strength: Generating a secure and memorable password 20.1 Writing password.py 20.1.1 Creating a unique list of words 20.1.2 Cleaning the text 20.1.3 Using a set 20.1.4 Filtering the words 20.1.5 Titlecasing the words 20.1.6 Sampling and making a password 20.1.7 l33t-ify 20.1.8 Putting it all together 20.2 Solution 20.3 Discussion 20.3.1 Cleaning the text 20.3.2 A king’s ransom 20.3.3 How to l33t() 20.3.4 Processing the files 20.3.5 Sampling and creating the passwords 20.4 Going further Summary 21 Tic-Tac-Toe: Exploring state 21.1 Writing tictactoe.py 21.1.1 Validating user input 21.1.2 Altering the board 21.1.3 Printing the board 21.1.4 Determining a winner 21.2 Solution 21.2.1 Validating the arguments and mutating the board 21.2.2 Formatting the board 21.2.3 Finding the winner 21.3 Going further Summary 22 Tic-Tac-Toe redux: An interactive version with type hints 22.1 Writing itictactoe.py 22.1.1 Tuple talk 22.1.2 Named tuples 22.1.3 Adding type hints 22.1.4 Type verification with Mypy 22.1.5 Updating immutable structures 22.1.6 Adding type hints to function definitions 22.2 Solution 22.2.1 A version using TypedDict 22.2.2 Thinking about state 22.3 Going further Summary Epilogue Appendix—Using argparse A.1 Types of arguments A.2 Using a template to start a program A.3 Using argparse A.3.1 Creating the parser A.3.2 Creating a positional parameter A.3.3 Creating an optional string parameter A.3.4 Creating an optional numeric parameter A.3.5 Creating an optional file parameter A.3.6 Creating a flag option A.3.7 Returning from get_args A.4 Examples using argparse A.4.1 A single positional argument A.4.2 Two different positional arguments A.4.3 Restricting values using the choices option A.4.4 Two of the same positional arguments A.4.5 One or more of the same positional arguments A.4.6 File arguments A.4.7 Manually checking arguments A.4.8 Automatic help Summary index Symbols A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z ”Tiny Python Projects is a gentle and amusing introduction to Python that will firm up key programming concepts while also making you giggle.”—Amanda Debler, Schaeffler Key Features Learn new programming concepts through 21-bitesize programs Build an insult generator, a Tic-Tac-Toe AI, a talk-like-a-pirate program, and more Discover testing techniques that will make you a better programmer Code-along with free accompanying videos on YouTube Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.About The Book The 21 fun-but-powerful activities in Tiny Python Projects teach Python fundamentals through puzzles and games. You'll be engaged and entertained with every exercise, as you learn about text manipulation, basic algorithms, and lists and dictionaries, and other foundational programming skills. Gain confidence and experience while you create each satisfying project. Instead of going quickly through a wide range of concepts, this book concentrates on the most useful skills, like text manipulation, data structures, collections, and program logic with projects that include a password creator, a word rhymer, and a Shakespearean insult generator. Author Ken Youens-Clark also teaches you good programming practice, including writing tests for your code as you go. What You Will Learn Write command-line Python programs Manipulate Python data structures Use and control randomness Write and run tests for programs and functions Download testing suites for each project This Book Is Written For For readers familiar with the basics of Python programming. About The Author Ken Youens-Clark is a Senior Scientific Programmer at the University of Arizona. He has an MS in Biosystems Engineering and has been programming for over 20 years. Table of Contents 1 How to write and test a Python program 2 The crow's nest: Working with strings 3 Going on a picnic: Working with lists 4 Jump the Five: Working with dictionaries 5 Howler: Working with files and STDOUT 6 Words count: Reading files and STDIN, iterating lists, formatting strings 7 Gashlycrumb: Looking items up in a dictionary 8 Apples and Bananas: Find and replace 9 Dial-a-Curse: Generating random insults from lists of words 10 Telephone: Randomly mutating strings 11 Bottles of Beer Song: Writing and testing functions 12 Ransom: Randomly capitalizing text 13 Twelve Days of Christmas: Algorithm design 14 Rhymer: Using regular expressions to create rhyming words 15 The Kentucky Friar: More regular expressions 16 The Scrambler: Randomly reordering the middles of words 17 Mad Libs: Using regular expressions 18 Gematria: Numeric encoding of text using ASCII values 19 Workout of the Day: Parsing CSV files, creating text table output 20 Password strength: Generating a secure and memorable password 21 Tic-Tac-Toe: Exploring state 22 Tic-Tac-Toe redux: An interactive version with type hints Tiny Python Projects is a gentle and amusing introduction to Python that will firm up key programming concepts while also making you giggle.Amanda Debler, Schaeffler Key Features Learn new programming concepts through 21-bitesize programs Build an insult generator, a Tic-Tac-Toe AI, a talk-like-a-pirate program, and more Discover testing techniques that will make you a better programmer Code-along with free accompanying videos on YouTube Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About The Book The 21 fun-but-powerful activities in Tiny Python Projects teach Python fundamentals through puzzles and games. Youll be engaged and entertained with every exercise, as you learn about text manipulation, basic algorithms, and lists and dictionaries, and other foundational programming skills. Gain confidence and experience while you create each satisfying project. Instead of going quickly through a wide range of concepts, this book concentrates on the most useful skills, like text manipulation, data structures, collections, and program logic with projects that include a password creator, a word rhymer, and a Shakespearean insult generator. Author Ken Youens-Clark also teaches you good programming practice, including writing tests for your code as you go. What You Will Learn Write command-line Python programs Manipulate Python data structures Use and control randomness Write and run tests for programs and functions Download testing suites for each project This Book Is Written For For readers familiar with the basics of Python programming. About The Author Ken Youens-Clark is a Senior Scientific Programmer at the University of Arizona. He has an MS in Biosystems Engineering and has been programming for over 20 years. Table of Contents 1 How to write and test a Python program 2 The crows Working with strings 3 Going on a Working with lists 4 Jump the Working with dictionaries 5 Working with files and STDOUT 6 Words Reading files and STDIN, iterating lists, formatting strings 7 Looking items up in a dictionary 8 Apples and Find and replace 9 Generating random insults from lists of words 10 Randomly mutating strings 11 Bottles of Beer Writing and testing functions 12 Randomly capitalizing text 13 Twelve Days of Algorithm design 14 Using regular expressions to create rhyming words 15 The Kentucky More regular expressions 16 The Randomly reordering the middles of words 17 Mad Using regular expressions 18 Numeric encoding of text using ASCII values 19 Workout of the Parsing CSV files, creating text table output 20 Password Generating a secure and memorable password 21 Exploring state 22 Tic-Tac-Toe An interactive version with type hints The 21 fun-but-powerful activities in this book teach Python fundamentals through puzzles and games. Youll be engaged and entertained with every exercise, as you learn about text manipulation, basic algorithms, and other foundational programming skills. -- Edited summary from book