Python: Beginner to Expert
John Lockwood 
Introduction Using VS Code as a Python IDE has many advantages. It is faster than PyCharm, and it is also a great general editor. That means you can use the same editor and keyboard shortcuts for Python as you use to edit your Bash scripts, JavaScript, and whatever else you may need to do. Unlike … Read more
If you have had a bad experience with math, you may already be discouraged about your ability to learn it. However, since you’re reading this and I’m writing it, let’s assume we both have some interest in the topic, and from that solid basis, let us both be encouraged. Alright, we both have an interest, … Read more
If you’re an experienced programmer who started in Python, you’re probably at least familiar with the basic uses of the with statement. The with statement in Python is an elegant way to manage resources, and is most famously implemented by Python’s open function. Here’s a simple example that prints its own contents and exits. Again, … Read more
This is an article about Git and GitHub, in which we’ll also tell a story about a dinosaur and his yellow floppy disks. We begin with Git and GitHub, lest we get too interested in the story and forget the real subject of this article. Git and GitHub are critical tools to know. For example, … Read more
Almost all Python developers encounter indexing early on when they learn about lists. As you probably already know, Python lists have zero-based indexes. That is to say, given a list named movies, for example, movies[0] returns the first element in the ist, while movies[len(movies)-1] returns the last element. So far, there’s nothing to see here, … Read more
In my recent article Introducing SageMath: Symbolic Math Software in Python, I discussed some issues I had encountered with some of SageMath’s installation options, and that I got it installed and working well on a Mac using the binary downloads that are available. I also hinted that I was able to create a Docker container … Read more
SageMath, sometimes called Sage, is a free, open mathematics software package with the mission of “Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab.” In other words, it is a computer algebra system, allowing you to do symbolic math in the same way you might work it out on paper. In … Read more
Writing effective functions is a crucial skill to master, in Python or in any programming language. Learning to write and use Python functions is like playing the game of Go or Chess. Understanding the game’s basic rules is simple enough, and you can quickly master these after a short introduction. However, learning to play well … Read more
Introduction In addition to being an excellent general-purpose programming language, Python is also well known as a handy language for scripting. Naturally, therefore, Python has support for the kinds of file searching and path operations one can do in a bash script, for example. However, finding files in Python can be daunting if you don’t … Read more
Introduction The ability to generate random values is an important programming skill. Even if you don’t need them every day, random values still show up in a surprising number of places. Of course, for many people, the first thing that comes to mind when they think about random values are game-related use cases such as … Read more
