Description

Book Synopsis

Zed A. Shaw is the author of the popular books, Learn Python the Hard Way, Learn Ruby the Hard Way, and Learn C the Hard Way. He is also the creator of several open source software projects and has been programming and writing for nearly 30 years. Most of his free time is devoted to the study of painting and art history.



Table of Contents

Preface xix

Module 1: Getting Started in Python 1

Exercise 0: Gearing Up 2
General Instructions 2
Minimalist Start 3
Complete Instructions 3
Testing Your Setup 3
Learning the Command Line 4
Next Steps 5

Exercise 1: A Good First Program 6
What You Should See 7
Study Drills 8
Common Student Questions 9
The Blue Plus 9

Exercise 2: Comments and Pound Characters 10
What You Should See 10
Study Drills 10
Common Student Questions 11

Exercise 3: Numbers and Math 12
What You Should See 13
Study Drills 13
Common Student Questions 13

Exercise 4: Variables and Names 16
What You Should See 17
Study Drills 17
Common Student Questions 17

Exercise 5: More Variables and Printing 20
What You Should See 20
Study Drills 21
Common Student Questions 21

Exercise 6: Strings and Text 22
What You Should See 23
Study Drills 23
Break It 23
Common Student Questions 24

Exercise 7: Combining Strings 26
What You Should See 26
Study Drills 26
Break It 27
Common Student Questions 27

Exercise 8: Formatting Strings Manually 28
What You Should See 28
Study Drills 29
Common Student Questions 29

Exercise 9: Multi-Line Strings 30
What You Should See 30
Study Drills 31
Common Student Questions 31

Exercise 10: Escape Codes in Strings 32
What You Should See 33
Escape Sequences 33
Study Drills 34
Common Student Questions 34

Exercise 11: Asking People Questions 36
What You Should See 36
Study Drills 37
Common Student Questions 37

Exercise 12: An Easier Way to Prompt 38
What You Should See 38
Study Drills 38
Common Student Questions 39

Exercise 13: Parameters, Unpacking, Variables 40
Code Description 41
Hold Up! Features Have Another Name 42
What You Should See 42
Study Drills 43
Common Student Questions 43

Exercise 14: Prompting and Passing 46
What You Should See 47
Study Drills 47
Common Student Questions 47

Exercise 15: Reading Files 50
What You Should See 51
Study Drills 51
Common Student Questions 52

Exercise 16: Reading and Writing Files 54
What You Should See 55
Study Drills 55
Common Student Questions 56

Exercise 17: More Files 58
What You Should See 59
Study Drills 59
Common Student Questions 59

Module 2: The Basics of Programming 61

Exercise 18: Names, Variables, Code, Functions 62
Exercise Code 63
What You Should See 65
Study Drills 65
Common Student Questions 66

Exercise 19: Functions and Variables 68
What You Should See 69
Study Drills 70
Common Student Questions 70

Exercise 20: Functions and Files 72
What You Should See 73
Study Drills 73
Common Student Questions 74

Exercise 21: Functions Can Return Something 76
What You Should See 77
Study Drills 77
Common Student Questions 78

Exercise 22: Strings, Bytes, and Character Encodings 80
Initial Research 80
Switches, Conventions, and Encodings 82
Dissecting the Output 84
Dissecting the Code 84
Encodings Deep Dive 86
Breaking It 87

Exercise 23: Introductory Lists 88
Accessing Elements of a List 88
Practicing Lists 89
The Code 89
The Challenge 90
Final Challenge 91

Exercise 24: Introductory Dictionaries 92
Key/Value Structures 92
Combining Lists with Data Objects 93
The Code 94
What You Should See 95
The Challenge 95
Final Challenge 96

Exercise 25: Dictionaries and Functions 98
Step 1: Function Names Are Variables 98
Step 2: Dictionaries with Variables 98
Step 3: Dictionaries with Functions 99
Step 4: Deciphering the Last Line 99
Study Drill 100

Exercise 26: Dictionaries and Modules 102
Step 1: Review of import 102
Step 2: Find the __dict__ 102
Step 3: Change the __dict__ 103
Study Drill: Find the "Dunders" 104

Exercise 27: The Five Simple Rules to the Game of Code 106
Rule 1: Everything Is a Sequence of Instructions 106
Rule 2: Jumps Make the Sequence Non-Linear 108
Rule 3: Tests Control Jumps 110
Rule 4: Storage Controls Tests 111
Rule 5: Input/Output Controls Storage 112
Putting It All Together 113

Exercise 28: Memorizing Logic 116
The Truth Terms 116
The Truth Tables 117
Common Student Questions 119

Exercise 29: Boolean Practice 120
What You Should See 122
Study Drills 122
Common Student Questions 122

Exercise 30: What If 124
What You Should See 124
dis() It 125
Study Drill 125
Common Student Questions 125

Exercise 31: Else and If 126
What You Should See 127
dis() It 127
Study Drills 128
Common Student Questions 128

Exercise 32: Making Decisions 130
What You Should See 131
dis() It 131
Study Drills 132
Common Student Questions 132

Exercise 33: Loops and Lists 134
What You Should See 135
dis() It 136
Study Drills 137
Common Student Questions 137

Exercise 34: While Loops 138
What You Should See 139
dis() It 139
Study Drills 140
Common Student Questions 140

Exercise 35: Branches and Functions 142
What You Should See 143
Study Drills 144
Common Student Questions 144

Exercise 36: Designing and Debugging 146
From Idea to Working Code 146
Rules for If-Statements 149
Rules for Loops 149
Tips for Debugging 149
Homework 150

Exercise 37: Symbol Review 152
Keywords 152
Data Types 153
String Escape Sequences 154
Old-Style String Formats 154
Operators 155
Reading Code 156
Study Drills 157
Common Student Questions 157

Module 3: Applying What You Know 159

Exercise 38: Beyond Jupyter for Windows 160
Why Learn PowerShell? 161
What Is PowerShell? 161
Crash Landing 171

Exercise 39: Beyond Jupyter for macOS/Linux 172
Why Learn Bash or ZSH? 173
What Is Bash? 173
Crash Landing 184

Exercise 40: Advanced Developer Tools 186
Managing conda Environments 186
Adding conda-forge 187
Using pip 188
Using a .condarc 188
General Editing Tips 189
Going Further 189

Exercise 41: A Project Skeleton 190
Activate an Environment 190
Just Use cookiecutter 190
Building Your Project 191
Installing Your Project 191
Testing the Install 192
Remove test-project 192
Common Errors 193
Study Drills 193

Exercise 42: Doing Things to Lists 194
What You Should See 195
What Lists Can Do 196
When to Use Lists 197
Study Drills 197
Common Student Questions 198

Exercise 43: Doing Things to Dictionaries 200
A Dictionary Example 201
What You Should See 203
What Dictionaries Can Do 203
Study Drills 204
Common Student Questions 204

Exercise 44: From Dictionaries to Objects 206
Step 1: Passing a Dict to a Function 206
Step 2: talk inside the Dict 207
Step 3: Closures 208
Step 4: A Person Constructor 209
Study Drills 211

Exercise 45: Basic Object-Oriented Programming 212
Python's People 212
Using dir() and __dict__ 213
About the Dot (.) 214
Terminology 215
A Word on self 216
Study Drills 217
Common Student Questions 217

Exercise 46: Inheritance and Advanced OOP 218
How This Looks in Code 219
About class Name(object) 221
Study Drills 221
Common Student Questions 222

Exercise 47: Basic Object-Oriented Analysis and Design 224
The Analysis of a Simple Game Engine 225
Top Down versus Bottom Up 229
The Code for "Gothons from Planet Percal #25" 230
What You Should See 236
Study Drills 237
Common Student Questions 237

Exercise 48: Inheritance versus Composition 238
What Is Inheritance? 238
The Reason for super() 243
Composition 243
When to Use Inheritance or Composition 245
Study Drill 245
Common Student Questions 246

Exercise 49: You Make a Game 248
Evaluating Your Game 248
Function Style 249
Class Style 249
Code Style 250
Good Comments 250
Evaluate Your Game 250

Exercise 50: Automated Testing 252
What Is the Purpose of Testing? 252
How to Test Efficiently 252
Install PyTest 253
Simple PyTest Demo 254
Running pytest 255
Exceptions and try/except 255
Getting Coverage Reports 256
Study Drills 256
Common Student Questions 257

Module 4: Python and Data Science 259

Exercise 51: What Is Data Munging? 260
Why Data Munging? 261
The Problem 261
The Setup 262
How to Code 262
Process Example 263
Solution Strategies 265
Awesome ETL Tools 266
Study Drills 266

Exercise 52: Scraping Data from the Web 268
Introducing with 268
The Problem 269
The Setup 269
The Clue 270
Awesome Scraping Tools 270
Study Drills 271

Exercise 53: Getting Data from APIs 272
Introducing JSON 272
The Problem 273
The Setup 274
The Clue 274
Awesome API Tools 275
Study Drills 275

Exercise 54: Data Conversion with pandas 276
Introducing Pandoc 276
The Problem 276
The Setup 277
The Clue 277
Study Drills 278

Exercise 55: How to Read Documentation (Featuring pandas) 280
Why Programmer Documentation Sucks 280
How to Actively Read Programmer Docs 281
Step #1: Find the Docs 281
Step #2: Determine Your Strategy 282
Step #3: Code First, Docs Second 283
Step #4: Break or Change the Code 283
Step #5: Take Notes 284
Step #6: Use It on Your Own 284
Step #7: Write About What You Learned 284
Step #8: What’s the Gestalt? 285
Reading My pandas Curriculum 286

Exercise 56: Using Only pandas 288
Make a Project 288
The Problem 288
The Setup 289
Study Drill 289

Exercise 57: The SQL Crash Course 290
What Is SQL? 290
The Setup 291
Fixing and Loading 292
Create, Read, Update, Delete 293
SELECT 293
Date and Time 294
INSERT 295
UPDATE 296
DELETE and Transactions 297
Math, Aggregates, and GROUP BY 298
Python Access 299

Exercise 58: SQL Normalization 300
What Is Normalization? 300
First Normal Form 301
Second Normal Form (2NF) 303
Querying 2NF Data 306
Querying with Joins 308
Study Drills 308

Exercise 59: SQL Relationships 310
One-to-Many (1:M) 310
Many-to-Many (M:M) 311
One-to-One (1:1) 312
Attributed Relations 313
Querying M:M Tables 313
Your Last Study Drill 314

Exercise 60: Advice from an Even Older Programmer 316

Index 318

Learn Python the Hard Way

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A Paperback / softback by Zed Shaw

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    View other formats and editions of Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw

    Publisher: Pearson Education (US)
    Publication Date: 06/01/2024
    ISBN13: 9780138270575, 978-0138270575
    ISBN10: 0138270570
    Also in:
    Computing Programming and scripting languages: general

    Description

    Book Synopsis

    Zed A. Shaw is the author of the popular books, Learn Python the Hard Way, Learn Ruby the Hard Way, and Learn C the Hard Way. He is also the creator of several open source software projects and has been programming and writing for nearly 30 years. Most of his free time is devoted to the study of painting and art history.



    Table of Contents

    Preface xix

    Module 1: Getting Started in Python 1

    Exercise 0: Gearing Up 2
    General Instructions 2
    Minimalist Start 3
    Complete Instructions 3
    Testing Your Setup 3
    Learning the Command Line 4
    Next Steps 5

    Exercise 1: A Good First Program 6
    What You Should See 7
    Study Drills 8
    Common Student Questions 9
    The Blue Plus 9

    Exercise 2: Comments and Pound Characters 10
    What You Should See 10
    Study Drills 10
    Common Student Questions 11

    Exercise 3: Numbers and Math 12
    What You Should See 13
    Study Drills 13
    Common Student Questions 13

    Exercise 4: Variables and Names 16
    What You Should See 17
    Study Drills 17
    Common Student Questions 17

    Exercise 5: More Variables and Printing 20
    What You Should See 20
    Study Drills 21
    Common Student Questions 21

    Exercise 6: Strings and Text 22
    What You Should See 23
    Study Drills 23
    Break It 23
    Common Student Questions 24

    Exercise 7: Combining Strings 26
    What You Should See 26
    Study Drills 26
    Break It 27
    Common Student Questions 27

    Exercise 8: Formatting Strings Manually 28
    What You Should See 28
    Study Drills 29
    Common Student Questions 29

    Exercise 9: Multi-Line Strings 30
    What You Should See 30
    Study Drills 31
    Common Student Questions 31

    Exercise 10: Escape Codes in Strings 32
    What You Should See 33
    Escape Sequences 33
    Study Drills 34
    Common Student Questions 34

    Exercise 11: Asking People Questions 36
    What You Should See 36
    Study Drills 37
    Common Student Questions 37

    Exercise 12: An Easier Way to Prompt 38
    What You Should See 38
    Study Drills 38
    Common Student Questions 39

    Exercise 13: Parameters, Unpacking, Variables 40
    Code Description 41
    Hold Up! Features Have Another Name 42
    What You Should See 42
    Study Drills 43
    Common Student Questions 43

    Exercise 14: Prompting and Passing 46
    What You Should See 47
    Study Drills 47
    Common Student Questions 47

    Exercise 15: Reading Files 50
    What You Should See 51
    Study Drills 51
    Common Student Questions 52

    Exercise 16: Reading and Writing Files 54
    What You Should See 55
    Study Drills 55
    Common Student Questions 56

    Exercise 17: More Files 58
    What You Should See 59
    Study Drills 59
    Common Student Questions 59

    Module 2: The Basics of Programming 61

    Exercise 18: Names, Variables, Code, Functions 62
    Exercise Code 63
    What You Should See 65
    Study Drills 65
    Common Student Questions 66

    Exercise 19: Functions and Variables 68
    What You Should See 69
    Study Drills 70
    Common Student Questions 70

    Exercise 20: Functions and Files 72
    What You Should See 73
    Study Drills 73
    Common Student Questions 74

    Exercise 21: Functions Can Return Something 76
    What You Should See 77
    Study Drills 77
    Common Student Questions 78

    Exercise 22: Strings, Bytes, and Character Encodings 80
    Initial Research 80
    Switches, Conventions, and Encodings 82
    Dissecting the Output 84
    Dissecting the Code 84
    Encodings Deep Dive 86
    Breaking It 87

    Exercise 23: Introductory Lists 88
    Accessing Elements of a List 88
    Practicing Lists 89
    The Code 89
    The Challenge 90
    Final Challenge 91

    Exercise 24: Introductory Dictionaries 92
    Key/Value Structures 92
    Combining Lists with Data Objects 93
    The Code 94
    What You Should See 95
    The Challenge 95
    Final Challenge 96

    Exercise 25: Dictionaries and Functions 98
    Step 1: Function Names Are Variables 98
    Step 2: Dictionaries with Variables 98
    Step 3: Dictionaries with Functions 99
    Step 4: Deciphering the Last Line 99
    Study Drill 100

    Exercise 26: Dictionaries and Modules 102
    Step 1: Review of import 102
    Step 2: Find the __dict__ 102
    Step 3: Change the __dict__ 103
    Study Drill: Find the "Dunders" 104

    Exercise 27: The Five Simple Rules to the Game of Code 106
    Rule 1: Everything Is a Sequence of Instructions 106
    Rule 2: Jumps Make the Sequence Non-Linear 108
    Rule 3: Tests Control Jumps 110
    Rule 4: Storage Controls Tests 111
    Rule 5: Input/Output Controls Storage 112
    Putting It All Together 113

    Exercise 28: Memorizing Logic 116
    The Truth Terms 116
    The Truth Tables 117
    Common Student Questions 119

    Exercise 29: Boolean Practice 120
    What You Should See 122
    Study Drills 122
    Common Student Questions 122

    Exercise 30: What If 124
    What You Should See 124
    dis() It 125
    Study Drill 125
    Common Student Questions 125

    Exercise 31: Else and If 126
    What You Should See 127
    dis() It 127
    Study Drills 128
    Common Student Questions 128

    Exercise 32: Making Decisions 130
    What You Should See 131
    dis() It 131
    Study Drills 132
    Common Student Questions 132

    Exercise 33: Loops and Lists 134
    What You Should See 135
    dis() It 136
    Study Drills 137
    Common Student Questions 137

    Exercise 34: While Loops 138
    What You Should See 139
    dis() It 139
    Study Drills 140
    Common Student Questions 140

    Exercise 35: Branches and Functions 142
    What You Should See 143
    Study Drills 144
    Common Student Questions 144

    Exercise 36: Designing and Debugging 146
    From Idea to Working Code 146
    Rules for If-Statements 149
    Rules for Loops 149
    Tips for Debugging 149
    Homework 150

    Exercise 37: Symbol Review 152
    Keywords 152
    Data Types 153
    String Escape Sequences 154
    Old-Style String Formats 154
    Operators 155
    Reading Code 156
    Study Drills 157
    Common Student Questions 157

    Module 3: Applying What You Know 159

    Exercise 38: Beyond Jupyter for Windows 160
    Why Learn PowerShell? 161
    What Is PowerShell? 161
    Crash Landing 171

    Exercise 39: Beyond Jupyter for macOS/Linux 172
    Why Learn Bash or ZSH? 173
    What Is Bash? 173
    Crash Landing 184

    Exercise 40: Advanced Developer Tools 186
    Managing conda Environments 186
    Adding conda-forge 187
    Using pip 188
    Using a .condarc 188
    General Editing Tips 189
    Going Further 189

    Exercise 41: A Project Skeleton 190
    Activate an Environment 190
    Just Use cookiecutter 190
    Building Your Project 191
    Installing Your Project 191
    Testing the Install 192
    Remove test-project 192
    Common Errors 193
    Study Drills 193

    Exercise 42: Doing Things to Lists 194
    What You Should See 195
    What Lists Can Do 196
    When to Use Lists 197
    Study Drills 197
    Common Student Questions 198

    Exercise 43: Doing Things to Dictionaries 200
    A Dictionary Example 201
    What You Should See 203
    What Dictionaries Can Do 203
    Study Drills 204
    Common Student Questions 204

    Exercise 44: From Dictionaries to Objects 206
    Step 1: Passing a Dict to a Function 206
    Step 2: talk inside the Dict 207
    Step 3: Closures 208
    Step 4: A Person Constructor 209
    Study Drills 211

    Exercise 45: Basic Object-Oriented Programming 212
    Python's People 212
    Using dir() and __dict__ 213
    About the Dot (.) 214
    Terminology 215
    A Word on self 216
    Study Drills 217
    Common Student Questions 217

    Exercise 46: Inheritance and Advanced OOP 218
    How This Looks in Code 219
    About class Name(object) 221
    Study Drills 221
    Common Student Questions 222

    Exercise 47: Basic Object-Oriented Analysis and Design 224
    The Analysis of a Simple Game Engine 225
    Top Down versus Bottom Up 229
    The Code for "Gothons from Planet Percal #25" 230
    What You Should See 236
    Study Drills 237
    Common Student Questions 237

    Exercise 48: Inheritance versus Composition 238
    What Is Inheritance? 238
    The Reason for super() 243
    Composition 243
    When to Use Inheritance or Composition 245
    Study Drill 245
    Common Student Questions 246

    Exercise 49: You Make a Game 248
    Evaluating Your Game 248
    Function Style 249
    Class Style 249
    Code Style 250
    Good Comments 250
    Evaluate Your Game 250

    Exercise 50: Automated Testing 252
    What Is the Purpose of Testing? 252
    How to Test Efficiently 252
    Install PyTest 253
    Simple PyTest Demo 254
    Running pytest 255
    Exceptions and try/except 255
    Getting Coverage Reports 256
    Study Drills 256
    Common Student Questions 257

    Module 4: Python and Data Science 259

    Exercise 51: What Is Data Munging? 260
    Why Data Munging? 261
    The Problem 261
    The Setup 262
    How to Code 262
    Process Example 263
    Solution Strategies 265
    Awesome ETL Tools 266
    Study Drills 266

    Exercise 52: Scraping Data from the Web 268
    Introducing with 268
    The Problem 269
    The Setup 269
    The Clue 270
    Awesome Scraping Tools 270
    Study Drills 271

    Exercise 53: Getting Data from APIs 272
    Introducing JSON 272
    The Problem 273
    The Setup 274
    The Clue 274
    Awesome API Tools 275
    Study Drills 275

    Exercise 54: Data Conversion with pandas 276
    Introducing Pandoc 276
    The Problem 276
    The Setup 277
    The Clue 277
    Study Drills 278

    Exercise 55: How to Read Documentation (Featuring pandas) 280
    Why Programmer Documentation Sucks 280
    How to Actively Read Programmer Docs 281
    Step #1: Find the Docs 281
    Step #2: Determine Your Strategy 282
    Step #3: Code First, Docs Second 283
    Step #4: Break or Change the Code 283
    Step #5: Take Notes 284
    Step #6: Use It on Your Own 284
    Step #7: Write About What You Learned 284
    Step #8: What’s the Gestalt? 285
    Reading My pandas Curriculum 286

    Exercise 56: Using Only pandas 288
    Make a Project 288
    The Problem 288
    The Setup 289
    Study Drill 289

    Exercise 57: The SQL Crash Course 290
    What Is SQL? 290
    The Setup 291
    Fixing and Loading 292
    Create, Read, Update, Delete 293
    SELECT 293
    Date and Time 294
    INSERT 295
    UPDATE 296
    DELETE and Transactions 297
    Math, Aggregates, and GROUP BY 298
    Python Access 299

    Exercise 58: SQL Normalization 300
    What Is Normalization? 300
    First Normal Form 301
    Second Normal Form (2NF) 303
    Querying 2NF Data 306
    Querying with Joins 308
    Study Drills 308

    Exercise 59: SQL Relationships 310
    One-to-Many (1:M) 310
    Many-to-Many (M:M) 311
    One-to-One (1:1) 312
    Attributed Relations 313
    Querying M:M Tables 313
    Your Last Study Drill 314

    Exercise 60: Advice from an Even Older Programmer 316

    Index 318

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