Learn Python the Hard Way. 5 Ed

Cover....1

Half Title....2

Title Page....4

Copyright Page....5

Contents....6

Preface....20

Improvements in the Fifth Edition....20

Acknowledgments....21

MODULE 1 Getting Started in Python....22

Exercise 0 Gearing Up....23

General Instructions....23

Minimalist Start....24

Complete Instructions....24

Testing Your Setup....24

Learning the Command Line....25

Next Steps....26

Exercise 1 A Good First Program....27

What You Should See....28

Study Drills....29

Common Student Questions....30

The Blue Plus....30

Exercise 2 Comments and Pound Characters....31

What You Should See....31

Study Drills....31

Common Student Questions....32

Exercise 3 Numbers and Math....33

What You Should See....34

Study Drills....34

Common Student Questions....34

Exercise 4 Variables and Names....37

What You Should See....38

Study Drills....38

Common Student Questions....38

Exercise 5 More Variables and Printing....41

What You Should See....41

Study Drills....42

Common Student Questions....42

Exercise 6 Strings and Text....43

What You Should See....44

Study Drills....44

Break It....44

Common Student Questions....45

Exercise 7 Combining Strings....47

What You Should See....47

Study Drills....47

Break It....48

Common Student Questions....48

Exercise 8 Formatting Strings Manually....49

What You Should See....49

Study Drills....50

Common Student Questions....50

Exercise 9 Multi-Line Strings....51

What You Should See....51

Study Drills....52

Common Student Questions....52

Exercise 10 Escape Codes in Strings....53

What You Should See....54

Escape Sequences....54

Study Drills....55

Common Student Questions....55

Exercise 11 Asking People Questions....57

What You Should See....57

Study Drills....58

Common Student Questions....58

Exercise 12 An Easier Way to Prompt....59

What You Should See....59

Study Drills....59

Common Student Questions....60

Exercise 13 Parameters, Unpacking, Variables....61

If You Get Lost....62

Code Description....62

Hold Up! Features Have Another Name....63

What You Should See....63

Study Drills....64

Common Student Questions....64

Exercise 14 Prompting and Passing....67

What You Should See....68

Study Drills....68

Common Student Questions....68

Exercise 15 Reading Files....71

What You Should See....72

Study Drills....72

Common Student Questions....73

Exercise 16 Reading and Writing Files....75

What You Should See....76

Study Drills....76

Common Student Questions....77

Exercise 17 More Files....79

What You Should See....80

Study Drills....80

Common Student Questions....80

MODULE 2 The Basics of Programming....82

Exercise 18 Names, Variables, Code, Functions....83

Exercise Code....84

What You Should See....86

Study Drills....86

Common Student Questions....87

Exercise 19 Functions and Variables....89

What You Should See....90

Study Drills....91

Common Student Questions....91

Exercise 20 Functions and Files....93

What You Should See....94

Study Drills....94

Common Student Questions....95

Exercise 21 Functions Can Return Something....97

What You Should See....98

Study Drills....98

Common Student Questions....99

Exercise 22 Strings, Bytes, and Character Encodings....101

Initial Research....101

Switches, Conventions, and Encodings....103

Dissecting the Output....105

Dissecting the Code....105

Encodings Deep Dive....107

Breaking It....108

Exercise 23 Introductory Lists....109

Accessing Elements of a List....109

Practicing Lists....110

The Code....110

The Challenge....111

Fruit Challenge....111

Cars Challenge....111

Languages Challenge....112

Final Challenge....112

Exercise 24 Introductory Dictionaries....113

Key/Value Structures....113

Combining Lists with Data Objects....114

The Code....115

What You Should See....116

The Challenge....116

Fruit Challenge....116

Cars Challenge....116

Languages Challenge....117

Final Challenge....117

Exercise 25 Dictionaries and Functions....119

Step 1: Function Names Are Variables....119

Step 2: Dictionaries with Variables....119

Step 3: Dictionaries with Functions....120

Step 4: Deciphering the Last Line....120

Study Drill ....121

Exercise 26 Dictionaries and Modules....123

Step 1: Review of import....123

Step 2: Find the __dict__....123

Step 3: Change the __dict__....124

Study Drill: Find the “Dunders”....125

Exercise 27 The Five Simple Rules to the Game of Code....127

Rule 1: Everything Is a Sequence of Instructions....127

How can I get this output?....128

Where are these bytes stored?....129

Rule 2: Jumps Make the Sequence Non-Linear....129

Why is this backward?....130

Can a JUMP go forward?....130

Rule 3: Tests Control Jumps....131

What do you mean “pop”?....132

Wait, aren’t tests like COMPARE_OP used in loops too?....132

Rule 4: Storage Controls Tests....132

Rule 5: Input/Output Controls Storage....133

Putting It All Together....134

The List of Byte Codes....134

dis() Is a Side Quest....135

Exercise 28 Memorizing Logic....137

The Truth Terms....137

The Truth Tables....138

Common Student Questions....140

Exercise 29 Boolean Practice....141

What You Should See....143

Study Drills....143

Common Student Questions....143

Exercise 30 What If....145

What You Should See....145

dis() It ....146

Study Drill....146

Common Student Questions....146

Exercise 31 Else and If....147

What You Should See....148

dis() It....148

Study Drills....149

Common Student Questions....149

Exercise 32 Making Decisions....151

What You Should See....152

dis() It....152

Study Drills....153

Common Student Questions....153

Exercise 33 Loops and Lists....155

What You Should See....156

dis() It ....157

Study Drills....158

Common Student Questions....158

Exercise 34 While Loops....159

What You Should See....160

dis() It....160

Study Drills....161

Common Student Questions....161

Exercise 35 Branches and Functions....163

What You Should See....164

Study Drills....165

Common Student Questions....165

Exercise 36 Designing and Debugging....167

From Idea to Working Code....167

Is This a Professional Process?....168

About the “X/Y” Non-Problem....169

Rules for If-Statements....170

Rules for Loops....170

Tips for Debugging....170

Homework....171

Exercise 37 Symbol Review....173

Keywords....173

Data Types....174

String Escape Sequences....175

Old-Style String Formats....175

Operators....176

Reading Code....177

Study Drills....178

Common Student Questions....178

MODULE 3 Applying What You Know....180

Exercise 38 Beyond Jupyter for Windows....181

Why Learn PowerShell?....182

What Is PowerShell?....182

PowerShell versus Cmder....184

Starting Jupyter....184

Getting Help....185

Where Are You with start?....185

Going from Graphics to PowerShell....186

Where Are You with pwd?....186

What’s in Here?....187

Files, Folders, Directories, and Paths....188

Moving Around....188

Relative Paths....189

Creating and Destroying....190

Flags and Arguments....190

Copy and Move....190

Environment Variables....191

Running Code....191

Common Key Sequences....192

Useful Developer Commands....192

Crash Landing....192

Exercise 39 Beyond Jupyter for macOS/Linux....193

macOS Troubles....194

Why Learn Bash or ZSH?....194

What Is Bash?....194

Starting Jupyter....196

Getting Help....196

Where Are You with open?....196

Going from Graphics to Bash....197

Where Are You with pwd?....198

What’s in Here?....198

Files, Folders, Directories, and Paths....199

Moving Around....200

Relative Paths....200

Creating and Destroying....201

Hidden Files....201

Flags and Arguments....202

Copy and Move....202

Environment Variables....203

Running Code....203

Common Key Sequences....204

Useful Developer Commands....204

Crash Landing....205

Exercise 40 Advanced Developer Tools....207

Managing conda Environments....207

Adding conda-forge....208

Using pip....209

Using a .condarc....209

General Editing Tips....210

Going Further....210

Exercise 41 A Project Skeleton....211

Activate an Environment....211

Just Use cookiecutter....211

Building Your Project....212

Installing Your Project....212

Testing the Install....213

Remove test-project....213

Common Errors....214

Study Drills....214

Exercise 42 Doing Things to Lists....215

What You Should See....216

What Lists Can Do....217

When to Use Lists....218

Study Drills....218

Common Student Questions....219

Exercise 43 Doing Things to Dictionaries....221

A Dictionary Example....222

What You Should See....224

What Dictionaries Can Do....224

Study Drills....225

Common Student Questions....225

Exercise 44 From Dictionaries to Objects....227

Step 1: Passing a Dict to a Function....227

What You Should See....228

Step 2: talk inside the Dict....228

Step 3: Closures....229

What You Should See....230

Step 4: A Person Constructor....230

Study Drills....232

Exercise 45 Basic Object-Oriented Programming....233

Python’s People....233

Using dir() and __dict__....234

About the Dot (.)....235

Terminology....236

A Word on self....237

Study Drills....238

Common Student Questions....238

Exercise 46 Inheritance and Advanced OOP....239

How This Looks in Code....240

About class Name(object)....242

Study Drills....242

Common Student Questions....243

Exercise 47 Basic Object-Oriented Analysis and Design....245

The Analysis of a Simple Game Engine....246

Write or Draw About the Problem....246

Extract Key Concepts and Research Them....247

Create a Class Hierarchy and Object Map for the Concepts....247

Code the Classes and a Test to Run Them....248

Repeat and Refine....250

Top Down versus Bottom Up....250

The Code for “Gothons from Planet Percal #25”....251

What You Should See....257

Study Drills....258

Common Student Questions....258

Exercise 48 Inheritance versus Composition....259

What Is Inheritance?....259

Implicit Inheritance....260

Override Explicitly....261

Alter Before or After....261

All Three Combined....263

The Reason for super()....264

Using super() with __init__()....264

Composition....264

When to Use Inheritance or Composition....266

Study Drill....266

Common Student Questions....267

Exercise 49 You Make a Game....269

Evaluating Your Game....269

Function Style....270

Class Style....270

Code Style....271

Good Comments....271

Evaluate Your Game....271

Exercise 50 Automated Testing....273

What Is the Purpose of Testing?....273

How to Test Efficiently....273

Install PyTest ....274

Simple PyTest Demo....275

Running pytest....276

Exceptions and try/except....276

Getting Coverage Reports....277

Study Drills....277

Common Student Questions....278

MODULE 4 Python and Data Science....280

Exercise 51 What Is Data Munging?....281

Why Data Munging?....282

The Problem....282

The Setup....283

How to Code....283

Process Example....284

Solution Strategies....286

Awesome ETL Tools....287

Study Drills....287

Exercise 52 Scraping Data from the Web....289

Introducing with....289

The Problem....290

The Setup....290

The Clue....291

Awesome Scraping Tools....291

Study Drills....292

Exercise 53 Getting Data from APIs....293

Introducing JSON....293

The Problem....294

The Setup....295

The Clue....295

Awesome API Tools....296

Study Drills....296

Exercise 54 Data Conversion with pandas....297

Introducing Pandoc....297

The Problem....297

The Setup....298

The Clue....298

Study Drills....299

Exercise 55 How to Read Documentation (Featuring pandas)....301

Why Programmer Documentation Sucks....301

How to Actively Read Programmer Docs....302

Step #1: Find the Docs....302

Step #1 with pandas....302

Step #2: Determine Your Strategy....303

Step #2 with pandas....303

Step #3: Code First, Docs Second....304

Step #3 with pandas....304

Step #4: Break or Change the Code....304

Step #5: Take Notes....305

Step #6: Use It on Your Own....305

Step #6 with pandas....305

Step #7: Write About What You Learned....305

Step #7 with pandas....306

Step #8: What’s the Gestalt?....306

Step #8 with pandas....307

Reading My pandas Curriculum....307

Exercise 56 Using Only pandas....309

Make a Project....309

The Problem....309

The Setup....310

Study Drill....310

Exercise 57 The SQL Crash Course....311

What Is SQL?....311

The Setup....312

Fixing and Loading....313

Back Up Your Database....313

Create, Read, Update, Delete....314

SELECT....314

Date and Time....315

INSERT....316

UPDATE....317

DELETE and Transactions....318

Math, Aggregates, and GROUP BY....319

Python Access....320

Exercise 58 SQL Normalization....321

What Is Normalization?....321

First Normal Form....322

Implementing 1NF....323

Creating Tables in SQL....324

Second Normal Form (2NF)....324

Implementing 2NF....325

Using Python....327

Querying 2NF Data....327

Querying with Joins....329

Study Drills....329

Exercise 59 SQL Relationships....331

One-to-Many (1:M)....331

One-to-Many in Python....331

One-to-Many Problem....332

Many-to-Many (M:M)....332

Many-to-Many Problem....333

One-to-One (1:1)....333

Attributed Relations....334

Querying M:M Tables....334

Your Last Study Drill....335

Exercise 60 Advice from an Even Older Programmer....337

Index....339

A....339

B....339

C....340

D....340

E....341

F....341

G....342

H....342

I....342

J....342

K....342

L....342

M....343

N....343

O....343

P....343

R....344

S....344

T....345

U....345

V....345

W....345

X....345

Z....345

In Learn Python the Hard Way, Fifth Edition, you'll learn Python by working through 60 lovingly crafted exercises. Read them. Type in the code. Run it. Fix your mistakes. Repeat. As you do, you'll learn how a computer works, how to solve problems, and how to enjoy programming . . . even when it's driving you crazy.

It'll be frustrating at first. But if you keep trying, you'll get it--and it'll feel amazing! This course will reward you for every minute you put into it. Soon, you'll know one of the world's most powerful, popular programming languages. You'll be a Python programmer.

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