CodeSolid Newsletter: October 25, 2022
Hello from CodeSolid,
I hope you’re having a great week. This last week brought a lot of progress, new material, and fixes to the website. We’re also welcoming new subscribers and the first feedback from existing ones. I thought I’d break down the latest newsletter into CodeSolid news and other interesting reads. But first, a bit of news:
Python 3.11 Has Been Released!
I just learned today that the release version of Python 3.11.0 is available for download from Python.org. I was also able to install it using Conda, but now there are some packages like JupypterLab whose dependencies need to catch up. Hopefully, that will be soon. It promises improved error handling and performance.
New On CodeSolid
I added some new practice questions and programming exercises to the online Python portal. There’s a lot more to do adding practice questions to existing articles, but what’s there so far are a good set of Pandas exercises, and several beginner-focused exercises on Boolean expressions, lists, and indexing and slicing. Solutions are available for all the exercises.
This week I reworked the front page to have a much more professional look. If you’re curious, I did this using Elementor Pro, which made it quite simple to do.
Writing a Python Custom Exception
Custom exceptions are extremely easy to write in Python, but may not always be needed. Learn how to create them and design best practices.
Using Matplotlib to Plot Math Functions
Graphing calculators make plotting math functions easy. It’s not as straightforward in Matplotlib, but working through it, we can learn a lot about how plotting works in Matplotlib as well as how to configure axes and other topics.
Other Reading
Python Extension for VS Code – October 2022 Release
I need to try upgrading mine to try out this environment feature. That’s one of the features of VS Code that I always found a bit unintuitive compared to PyCharm.
16 Reasons to Use VS Code for Developing Jupyter Notebooks
VS Code has many features that make it a useful platform for Jupyter Notebook development.
A book I’m really enjoying this week is Before the Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond, by Laura Mersini-Houghton, who teaches only a couple of hours from me at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m a sucker for pop-physics books, and this one is a really well-done treatment of quantum cosmology.