Description
Book SynopsisImpractical Python picks up where the complete beginners book leaves off, expanding on existing concepts and introducing new tools and techniques that you'll use every day. Just flip to any page, cookbook-style, and test your skills with software design, code optimization, and debugging. To keep thing interesting, each project includes a zany twist featuring historical incidents, pop culture, literature, comics, and the purely scientific.
Trade Review"Python is a programming language, but it is also fun to play with. This book recognizes that."
—Geek Tech Stuff"Rather than being an introductory text, Vaughan’s book pushes you in interesting directions for solving a diverse set of problems. Most of these “impractical” projects, while themselves being not so useless after all, will have parallels to real life projects."
—Greg Laden, Greg Laden's Blog
"The book is not a Python tutorial or guide. Instead, it presents stimulating coding projects for non-programmers who want to use Python for doing experiments, test theories, or simulate natural phenomena.”
—Paolo Amoroso, Moonshots Beyond the Cloud Blog"A must have second book for every developer that ever wants to learn Python as a language."
—Ian Mizer, Atlanta Python Programmers Group
"The writing is excellent . . . Every project is accessible and has enough explanation to motivate coding."
—Ravi Srinivasan, Playful PythonTable of ContentsIntroduction
Chapter 1: Silly Name Generator
Chapter 2: Finding Palingram Spells
Chapter 3: Solving Anagrams
Chapter 4: Decoding American Civil War Ciphers
Chapter 5: Encoding English Civil War Ciphers
Chapter 6: Writing in Invisible Ink
Chapter 7: Breeding Giant Rats with Genetic Algorithms
Chapter 8: Counting Syllables for Haiku Poetry
Chapter 9: Writing Haiku with Markov Chain Analysis
Chapter 10: Are We Alone? Exploring the Fermi Paradox
Chapter 11: The Monty Hall Problem
Chapter 12: Securing your Nest Egg
Chapter 13: Simulating an Alien Volcano
Chapter 14: Mapping Mars with the Mars Orbiter
Chapter 15: Improving Your Astrophotography with Planet Stacking
Chapter 16: Finding Frauds with Benford's Law
Appendix: Practice Project Solutions
