Learn the basics of Python with these beginner-friendly tutorials
The TOML (Tom’s Obvious Minimal Language) format came out in 2013, so it’s been around for more than a decade. Python added support for TOML in Python 3.11 with its tomllib module in the standard library. However, unlike some of Python’s other standard libraries, such as jsonor its XML-related libraries, the tomllib library is only […]
Python 101: Reading TOML with Python Read More »
Happy Fourth of July! I am hosting a sale for the 4th of July weekend, where you can get 25% off most of my books and courses. Here are the books included in the sale and the direct links with the 25% coupon already applied: Python 101 Python 201: Intermediate Python ReportLab: PDF Processing in
Python eBook Fourth of July Sale Read More »
Ty is a brand new, extremely fast Python type checker written in Rust from the fine folks at Astral, the makers of Ruff. Ty is in preview and is not ready for production use, but you can still try it out on your code base to see how it compares to Mypy or other popular
An Intro to ty – The Extremely Fast Python type checker Read More »
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup format originally for XML. Some companies use XML as a data serialization format or for configuration. Recently, I needed to learn how to uncomment some lines in an XML file to enable some settings that were defined in the XML. Fortunately, Python’s xml module provides a way
Parsing XML Comments with Python Read More »
Many programs require configuration. Most have a default configuration and many allow the user to adjust that configuration. There are many different types of configuration files. Some use text files while others use databases. Python has a standard library called configparser that you can use to work with Microsoft Windows INI files. In this tutorial,
Python 101 – An Intro to Working with INI files Using configparser Read More »
I recently needed to figure out how to write an updater script for a project I was working on. The application is released on an internal GitHub page with compressed files and an executable. I needed a way to check the latest release artifacts in GitHub and download them. Let’s find out how all this
How to Download the Latest Release Assets from GitHub with Python Read More »
I am running a Spring sale on all my currently published Python books. You can get 25% off any of my complete books by using this code at checkout: MSON4QP Learn Python Today! I have books on the following topics: Basic Python Intermediate Python Python and PDFs Python and Excel Image Processing with Python
ANN: Spring Python eBook Sale 2025 Read More »
You can use many great tools to help you in your software development journey. One such tool is pre-commit, a framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks. You use pre-commit to run one or more tools before allowing you to commit your code locally. For example, you might run the Flake8 linter or the Ruff formatter
An Intro to pre-commit Read More »
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas from me to you! I have been giving away hundreds of Python books and courses for Christmas for the last couple of years! From now until Christmas, I will be giving away hundreds more. You can start learning Python for free using my books or courses. All you have to
The Python Countdown to Christmas 2024 Giveaway Read More »
Reading and writing files is a basic task that most software applications need to do. You will also find that you sometimes need to read and write files to a remote machine or perhaps run commands on a remote machine as well. Python is well-suited for this type of activity using tools such as Paramiko.
SSH Scripting with Fabric and Python Read More »
Textual v0.80.0 was released today, and it included the brand-new MaskedInput widget. If you have used other GUI toolkits, such as wxPython, you might already be familiar with a masked input widget. These widgets allow you to control the user’s input based on a mask string that the developer provides when instantiating the widget. Let’s spend
Textual – The New MaskedInput Widget Read More »
My Kickstarter for my latest Python book is still going on for another eight days. Now is a great time to pre-order the book as well as get my other Python books. The project is fully funded, and I added a stretch goal. Stretch Goal The stretch goal is $5000 or 350 backers. If we reach
JupyterLab 101 Kickstarter Stretch Goal Read More »
The Python programming language has thousands of wonderful third-party packages available on the Python Package Index. One of those packages is TerminalTextEffects (TTE), a terminal visual effects engine. Here are the features that TerminalTextEffects provides, according to their documentation: Xterm 256 / RGB hex color support Complex character movement via Paths, Waypoints, and motion easing,
Adding Terminal Effects with Python Read More »
Have you ever wanted to create a plot or graph in your terminal? Okay, maybe you haven’t, but now that you know you can, you want to! Python has the plotext package for plotting in your terminal. However, while that package is amazing all on its own, there is another package called textual-plotext that wraps
How to Plot in the Terminal with Python and Textualize Read More »
The Textual package is a great way to create GUI-like applications with Python in your terminal. These are known as text-based user interfaces or TUIs. Textual has many different widgets built-in to the framework. One of those widgets is the ProgressBar. If you need to show the progress of a download or long-running process, then
Creating Progress Bars in Your Terminal with Python and Textual Read More »