Description
Product Description
Impractical Python Projects is a collection of fun and educational projects designed to entertain programmers while enhancing their Python skills. It picks up where the complete beginner books leave off, expanding on existing concepts and introducing new tools that you'll use every day. And to keep things interesting, each project includes a zany twist featuring historical incidents, pop culture references, and literary allusions.
You'll flex your problem-solving skills and employ Python's many useful libraries to do things like:
- Help James Bond crack a high-tech safe with a hill-climbing algorithm
- Write haiku poems using Markov Chain Analysis
- Use genetic algorithms to breed a race of gigantic rats
- Crack the world's most successful military cipher using cryptanalysis
- Derive the anagram, "I am Lord Voldemort" using linguistical sieves
- Plan your parents' secure retirement with Monte Carlo simulation
- Save the sorceress Zatanna from a stabby death using palingrams
- Model the Milky Way and calculate our odds of detecting alien civilizations
- Help the world's smartest woman win the Monty Hall problem argument
- Reveal Jupiter's Great Red Spot using optical stacking
- Save the head of Mary, Queen of Scots with steganography
- Foil corporate security with invisible electronic ink
Simulate volcanoes, map Mars, and more, all while gaining valuable experience using free modules like Tkinter, matplotlib, Cprofile, Pylint, Pygame, Pillow, and Python-Docx.
Whether you're looking to pick up some new Python skills or just need a pick-me-up, you'll find endless educational, geeky fun with
Impractical Python Projects.
Review
This is a great "next book." It helps you become a better coder and helps you to think more iteratively about your coding design.
--Teaching Python with Kelly & Sean
If you're comfortable writing standard Python, this book will show you how to use other people's libraries to do cool things easily.
--Boston Python
This might be a gold standard in Python educational material. A must have second book for every developer that ever wants to learn Python as a language.
--Bytecode The Official PyATL Blog
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'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, testing theories, or simulating natural phenomena."
--Paolo Amoroso, Moonshots Beyond the Cloud Blog
About the Author
Lee Vaughan is a geologist with over 30 years' experience in the petroleum industry. As the Senior Technical Professional for Geological Modeling at a major international oil company, he was involved in the construction and review of computer models, the development, testing, and commercialization of software, and the training of geoscientists and engineers. An advocate for nonprogrammers who must use programming in their careers, he wrote
Impractical Python Projects to help self-learners hone their skills with the Python language. His latest Python book,
Real-World Python, came out in November, 2020.