What is a regular expression? We can talk about that in detail some other time. Briefly, it is a string of symbols that is designed to match a specified set of symbols, or a range of a set of symbols, in a larger body or stream of text. For example, if you pass a stream of information (say, all your emails) through a filter with the regular expression:

‘\d\d\d-\d\d\d-\d\d\d\d’

then any part of that stream of information that looks like a phone number (not using parens), such as 636-555-3226, will be isolated.

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is a book that teaches beginning Python computer Augean programming focusing on examples from day to day life, including but well beyond REs.

The new edition includes pattern matching with regular expressions, input validation, reading and writing files, organizing files, web scraping, manipulating Excel spreadsheets and Google Sheets, PDF and Word documents, CSV and JSON files, email, images, and automating your keyboard and mouse.

The great benefit of a book like this is that you learn Python (the first part of the book gives you all you need to know to program in Python) in the context of things you actually want to do with Python. If you are interested in learning Python, or coding in general, this can be your first book.

The book is well done, as all in this series are, and fun. There are strong on line resources including all the code, and that information is regularly updated. Generally, “No Starch” press books are great, and this is one of those!

I would like to have seen at least sidebars on manipulating things using Libreoffice software, but note that the book focuses on documents, and OpenSource software does work with normal Excel and Word documents, so it is there.

The second edition adds a new chapter on input validation. The Gmail and Google Sheets sections, and the information on CSV files is also new. I plan on using the software tips and tricks to develop my own highly specialized and targeted search software. I’m often looking for files that have specific extensions, and certain kinds of content, in certain locations. Just the ability to hard-wire where to search for files will save me a lot of time and trouble.

Author Al Sweigart is a professional software developer who teaches programming to kids and adults, and who is author of Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, Cracking Codes with Python, and Coding with Minecraft, all of which are quite nice. We need a new edition of Coding with Minecraft, by the way, that looks at a wider range of coding options and keeps up with the major advances in that software environment! So, get to work, Al!

The level of sophistication of the products this book aims for is fairly astounding, and using only basic Python tools. Better than a Spirograph.

The most interesting thing about the material provided by Farrell is how little coding is required to do spectacular and complicated math; you learn some very nice coding technique in this book. But at the same time you get to learn some math. Kids interested in coding can easily handle this in Middle School, with some guidance, and adults who want to learn Python and have a math orientation will love it. But it is also a good book to have around as a reference if you normally work with numbers, shapes, basic math, and things like complex numbers and systems of equations. You will find useful tools herein.

Math Adventures with Python is really fun.

Uses Python 3, and this is the TOC:

Part 1: Hitchin’ Up Your Python Wagon
Chapter 1: Drawing Polygons with Turtles
Chapter 2: Making Tedious Arithmetic Fun with Lists and Loops
Chapter 3: Guessing and Checking with Conditionals

Part 2: Riding into Math Territory
Chapter 4: Transforming and Storing Numbers with Algebra
Chapter 5: Transforming Shapes with Geometry
Chapter 6: Creating Oscillations with Trigonometry
Chapter 7: Complex Numbers
Chapter 8: Using Matrices for Computer Graphics and Systems of Equations

Part 3: Blazing Your Own Trail
Chapter 9: Building Objects with Classes
Chapter 10: Creating Fractals Using Recursion
Chapter 11: Cellular Automata
Chapter 12: Solving Problems Using Genetic Algorithms

Knowing how the elements of a program work is fine and dandy, but applying programming concepts to the real world is where the rubber of code meets the reality of … running code, I guess. Impractical Python Projects: Playful Programming Activities to Make You Smarter is full of code examples, and they are said to be impractical, but really, that depends on why you even use computers. For example, one might want to breed rodents of unusual size, or come up with an anagram suitable for a Dark Wizard. Even more useful is calculating the odds of detecting alien civilizations (I for one welcome our hypothetical overlords from elsewhere in the universe). Make a python programmed volcano for your next science project. Seriously, that’s not a bad idea for the kiddo…

To give you an idea, here are the chapters:

Chapter 1: Silly Name Generator
Chapter 2: Finding Palingram Spells
Chapter 3: Solving Anagrams
Chapter 4: Decoding American Civil War Ciphers
Chapter 5: Encoding English Civil War Ciphers
Chapter 6: Writing in Invisible Ink
Chapter 7: Breeding Giant Rats with Genetic Algorithms
Chapter 8: Counting Syllables for Haiku Poetry
Chapter 9: Writing Haiku with Markov Chain Analysis
Chapter 10: Are We Alone? Exploring the Fermi Paradox
Chapter 11: The Monty Hall Problem
Chapter 12: Securing your Nest Egg
Chapter 13: Simulating an Alien Volcano
Chapter 14: Mapping Mars with the Mars Orbiter
Chapter 15: Improving Your Astrophotography with Planet Stacking
Chapter 16: Finding Frauds with Benford’s Law

This book does something else, that not too many coding instruction books do. The author, Lee Vaughan, builds small projects that work, then applies python based methods to analyze the code, showing how the original project had problems of one kind or another, then builds them again. The results are surprising, even spectacular, and very instructive.

The book does assume a basic knowledge of how python works, but that is not hard to get from any of several other books, or on line. Rather than being an introductory text, Vaughan’s project 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 (there are those of us that need to produce or evaluate anagrams now and then, for example) will have parallels to real life projects. For example, the exploration of the Fermi Paradox and Drake Equation can serve as a template for a wide range of simulations, and the section on Benford’s law can, well, help you cheat better on your taxes!

This is just plain a fun book, and it is useful, not impractical.

Python Flash Cards: Syntax, Concepts, and Examples is a new book-not-a-book that helps people who are staring out learning the Python programming language.

First, lets get one thing straight about Phython. If you (or, maybe, your kid) is going to learn to code, you’ve got to learn Python. It isn’t the only coding language out there, and depending on what you do with coding, Python might be something you do all the time or almost never. But it is a good bet that the arbitrary future coder will be coding in Python in the future.

Python is both simple and complex, easy and hard. I think it is probably easier for people who have never previously coded to learn than for old timers who cut their teeth on structured languages. Python actually is structured, but it is also object oriented. If you don’t know the difference between the two, don’t worry. Suffice it to say that the following works:

This is using a command interpreter, demonstrating that Python is sort of like a command line language if you want it to be. I entered Python statements and got instant results. That is not how Python is usually run, but it can be helpful.

Notice that I created a “list” which is an object that includes a list of things. I cleverly made the list, in its original form, a sentence of sorts. I then printed it so you could see that the list indeed has stuff in it. What I did there could be done in a similar form in virtually any language, though the concept of a “list” in Python (as opposed to the very similar “array” or “matrix” in other languages) is much more powerful than demonstrated here.

Then, I did the object-oriented thing. I called up the list (“aList”) but with a dot followed by a thing that made that list change. It became sorted. I then printed it.

Anyway, enough messing around. Python is a great and powerful Oz of a language, and it is very widely used, which means that there are a LOT of powerful libraries that can be drawn on to do a lot of things.

If you, or your kid, plays around with a Raspberry Pi, then you’ll want to learn Python because that is the handiest way to program it.

So, back to the Python Flash Cards. There are helpful and just plain fun. As you learn concepts, you can go through the cards and use them exactly like flash cards (because they are actual flash cards) to both review and backfill gaps in your knowledge.

The topics on the cards range from “what is a string” to how to loop through lists (yes, you can loop through a list) to how to define classes and methods (that’s object-oriented stuff, where you make your own object oriented mojo like the “sort” thingie we used above).

The author is Eric Matthes, a high school science and math teacher in Alaska. He teaches introductory programming classes. He is the author of the previously reviewed and highly recommended Python Crash Course: A Hands-On, Project-Based Introduction to Programming, which goes nicely with the flash cards.

The flash cards are not available yet but will be out in a few days. You can pre-order. They will come in time for the holidays, and they are, in fact, a great holiday gift for your 11 year old future programmer.

Its mascot is a cat, of course, but the name “scratch” supposedly comes from the use of scratching by disk jockeys. Scratch was first developed at MIT back in the early 2000s, and has advanced considerably since then. You now see the basic format of this language either duplicated or mimicked in many different environments.

Scratch can be an online langauge or you can run a stand alone version, but the former is easier and better. To get started, go here and follow instructions.

If you want (your kid or you) to learn scratch fast, you may want to consider getting the cards produced by No Starch Press. You can get ScratchJr Coding Cards for ages 5 and up, or the much more advanced Scratch Coding Cards for kids 8 and above.

The idea is simple. You put the stack of cards on your desk next to the computer, which is tuned to the MIT Scratch site. Then you try out the stuff in the cards. By the time you are done you (or your kid if you step aside and allow access to the computer) will be pretty good at scratch programming.

By the way, Scratch runs on the web so you can access it from any sort of desktop or laptop computer including Chromebooks,a nd there are iOS and Android versions. It runs on the Kindle Fire as well.

The Scratch programming language is a project set at MIT. Scratch programming involves moving images, called blocks, from a pallet into a work area, hooking them together and maybe changing some values attached to them, in order to develop programs that mainly, but not exclusively, manipulate sprites. (See example of code blokcks above.) The project is located HERE. This is a full object oriented programming language with quite a few features that make it very powerful, for a kid’s toy.

When you use Scratch, normally, you are interacting with the server at MIT via a web page. This allows you to use Scratch on any device regardless of operating system or power, as long as you have an internet connection. It also means the development environment is always up to date. And, on this site, you can interact with all the other scratch coders in the world, and borrow each other’s code, etc.

There is also a version of Scratch that can be run in stand-alone mode on a computer.

And now, there is a version of this stand alone program that is designed to run on a Raspberry Pi.

This version of Scratch has coding elements that control the General Purpose Input Output (GPIO) pins on the Pi. This means you can use the Scratch programming language to interface not merely with sprites on a screen, but with anything physical in the real world, and in so doing, TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!! BWA HAHAHAHA!!

You probably think I’m kidding but I’m not. It is well known that ten thousand chimpanzees randomly banging on keyboards will recreate all the works of Shakespeare. But it will take so long that the Universe will have ended by then. But if you give a few million kids the ability to write programs that interact with the real world it won’t take nearly that much time for them to change the world itself, considerably. Who can even imagine how? But I digress.

Anyway, we have a very easily learned and potentially very powerful software development environment married to a machine that has essentially unlimited abilities to interact with the physical world via GPIO pins, which ultimately can control any kind of switch, motor, sensor, other computer, or anything, that is electronic or that knows something that is electronic.

None of this is sudden. Scratch has been around a long time, and comes from a heritage of software development that goes back to the very beginning of modern languages. The ability to control GPIO like pins is exactly what controllers of all sorts have been doing for years. There has been a stand along version of scratch from early on in the MIT project, presumably with some version predating the on line version. The ability to interact with Raspberry Pi GPIO pins has always been there because you can write special code for Scratch and the actual ability (instead of the merely pedantically potential ability) has been around for maybe a year or so. But over recent months the stand along scratch that you would install on a Raspberry Pi and that has a fairly rich feature set has come to life. Bwa hahahaha!

One way to access this significant power is to buy into the Kano system. You can get a Kano Computer Kit for just under $150. It allows you to build a sort of laptop, including a keyboard and some other stuff (but you supply the screen). The box that holds the Pi, on which Kano is built, has some fancy LED lights that can be manipulated with Scratch. It also comes with a Makey-Makey like sensor that allows some additional interacton. But I’m afraid that’s about it.

I can’t recommend the Kano computer for most users. The markup on the LED lights and the ground fault serial interface device feels like 1000%, though I’m sure it is very nicely packaged and all that. If you go farther, and get the more elaborate Kano Computer Kit Complete , for just under $250, you get some additional LED lights and some sort of microphone. Kano also has a Motion Sensor kit for $23 bucks sold separately, which I think comes with the afore mentioned kits, and there are other things you can get.

In short, Kano looks great, seems nice, may be a really cook kid friendly set of technology, but I’m afraid there will be a close correlation between families that benefit from Kano and families that benefit from the Republican-Trump tax bill.

A Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Motherboard costs about $35. Put that together with stuff you have laying around, like your TV or an extra monitor, a keyboard and mouse, etc. Maybe get some sort of breakout kit such as the Smraza T Type GPIO Breakout board for Raspberry Pi 3 2 Mode B/B+ with 830 tie-points Breadboard and 40 Pin Rainbow Cable. This allows you to more easily attach things to the Pi. The Pi-3 already has internet and Bluetooth capabilities.

The most current version of the Rapsperry Pi operating system, a form of Linux called Raspbian (for Rasperry and Debian, a classic form of Linux) has the offline Scratch language built in. Go to this site to learn more about that. Then you can have code blocks like this:

Depending on that GIPO pin number 2 is hooked to, you can now TAKE OVER THE WORLD … BWA HAHAHAHAHA!!!

But seriously, this is very cool, and very powerful.

I predict that in the not too distant future, the Internet of Things will be operated with, essentially, the Scratch programming language. It is accessible to regular people, allowing them to modify their home automation, and allows companies that install this sort of thing to have much more powerful technicians with less effort on training. Think of Scratch on controller software to be a bit like the old Microsoft Windows macros — remember that? — back when that technology was usable, and in fact used, by people who knew virtually nothing about the computers they were using.

What could possibly go wrong?

It covers how Python works, so someone familiar with programming languages can get up to speed. Then, the book tackles a number of key important tasks one may use a computer for. This includes working with Regular Expressions, file reading and writing, web scraping, interacting with Excel spreadsheets and PDF files, scheduling things, working with email, manipulating images, and messing around with the keyboard and mouse.

I wold like to see a second volume with yet more programming ideas and examples. It could be a series.

From the publishers:

If you’ve ever spent hours renaming files or updating hundreds of spreadsheet cells, you know how tedious tasks like these can be. But what if you could have your computer do them for you?

In Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, you’ll learn how to use Python to write programs that do in minutes what would take you hours to do by hand—no prior programming experience required. Once you’ve mastered the basics of programming, you’ll create Python programs that effortlessly perform useful and impressive feats of automation to:

Search for text in a file or across multiple files

Create, update, move, and rename files and folders

Search the Web and download online content

Update and format data in Excel spreadsheets of any size

Split, merge, watermark, and encrypt PDFs

Send reminder emails and text notifications

Fill out online forms

Step-by-step instructions walk you through each program, and practice projects at the end of each chapter challenge you to improve those programs and use your newfound skills to automate similar tasks.

Check it out.

Would you like a subset, or all, of these books, in electronic format, for very cheap? There is a way to do that. Note: This is time sensitive, the offer running for just about two weeks and it started yesterday.

I’ve reviewed several of these books on this blog, and have recommended them. I’m going through Python Crash Course right now, and we’ve found the various kids programming books to be helpful, for instance. I’ve not looked at the grey hat or black hat books, but I’m sure they are fine.

The publisher, No Starch Press, has created one of those deals where you give them a small amount of money and they give you a pile of books. Since I review a lot of books, esp. computer related books, the publishers sent me the info on this, asking if I would pass it on. See the site for details, but you can have have the firs three for $1+, those plus the next three for $8, and those plus the bottom three for $15+. In addition, if you get the first bundle (or more) you get a “sampler,” which is probably a big pamphlet for their other books, not sure.

Here is something really important, to some of you, about these eBooks: They come in multiple formats and are DRM free. So this is not as restrictive as, say, getting a book from Amazon or B&N. They are in PDF, MOBI, ePUB so they’ll work on pretty much any reader.

There is also an option for donating so a charity, including the Python Foundation, but also, pretty much any charity you can think of, while you buy the books. You can divide your payment between the publisher, the charity, and a tip jar. I’m not sure who gets the tip!

Any on of these books costs more than all of them, in any format, so if there is any single book on this list that you were going to get anyway, in electronic form, now’s your chance to get a whole big pile of them. With books, that is always a good things. And, since they are electronic, when you move, they add hardly any weight to your stuff! Electrons are light!

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners
Doing Math with Python: Use Programming to Explore Algebra, Statistics, Calculus, and More!
Teach Your Kids to Code: A Parent-Friendly Guide to Python Programming
Gray Hat Python: Python Programming for Hackers and Reverse Engineers
Python Playground: Geeky Projects for the Curious Programmer
Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming
Black Hat Python: Python Programming for Hackers and Pentesters
Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python
Python Crash Course: A Hands-On, Project-Based Introduction to Programming

HERE IS THE LINK TO GET THE BUNDLE DEAL AT NO STARCH PRESS

Learning Python
Python Crash Course: A Hands-On, Project-Based Introduction to Programming is a fast-paced, thorough introduction to programming with Python that will have you writing programs, solving problems, and making things that work in no time.

In the first half of the book, you’ll learn about basic programming concepts, such as lists, dictionaries, classes, and loops, and practice writing clean and readable code with exercises for each topic. You’ll also learn how to make your programs interactive and how to test your code safely before adding it to a project. In the second half of the book, you’ll put your new knowledge into practice with three substantial projects: a Space Invaders-inspired arcade game, data visualizations with Python’s super-handy libraries, and a simple web app you can deploy online.

My review: How to learn Python programming

MORE COMING SOON

Learn Scratch Programming (For Kids And Adults)

Scratch, the colorful drag-and-drop programming language, is used by millions of first-time learners, and in Scratch Programming Playground, you’ll learn to program by making cool games. Get ready to destroy asteroids, shoot hoops, and slice and dice fruit!

Each game includes easy-to-follow instructions, review questions, and creative coding challenges to make the game your own. Want to add more levels or a cheat code? No problem, just write some code.

Coding projects in Scratch and other items.

Learn Python Using Minecraft

Write Computer Games In Python

Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python will teach you how to make computer games using the popular Python programming language–even if you’ve never programmed before!

Begin by building classic games like Hangman, Guess the Number, and Tic-Tac-Toe, and then work your way up to more advanced games, like a text-based treasure hunting game and an animated collision-dodging game with sound effects. Along the way, you’ll learn key programming and math concepts that will help you take your game programming to the next level.

Scratch Programming For Kids, By The Cards

Want to introduce kids to coding in a fun and creative way?

With the Scratch Coding Cards, kids learn to code as they create interactive games, stories, music, and animations. The short-and-simple activities provide an inviting entry point into Scratch, the graphical programming language used by millions of kids around the world.

Kids can use this colorful 75-card deck to create a variety of interactive programming projects. They’ll create their own version of Pong, Write an Interactive Story, Create a Virtual Pet, Play Hide and Seek, and more!

Each card features step-by-step instructions for beginners to start coding with Scratch. The front of the card shows an activity kids can do with Scratch–like animating a character or keeping score in a game. The back shows how to put together code blocks to make the projects come to life! Along the way, kids learn key coding concepts, such as sequencing, conditionals, and variables.

This collection of coding activity cards is perfect for sharing among small groups in homes and schools.