PDF The Big Book of Small Python Projects - AI Sweigart

434 pages

This curated collection of simple Python projects lets you dive right in and make digital art, games, animations, number-crunching tools and more – right away! Forget standard step-by-step tutorials; instead, author Al Sweigart takes a learn-by-doing approach that provides you with over 80 programs to manually copy, run, and play with. Once you see how the code works, it’s time to experiment with your own changes and practice re-creating them yourself.

Each project is a standalone mini-chapter that includes a sample run of the program’s output, the source code, and suggestions for customization. Whether it’s a vintage screensaver, a snail-racing game, a clickbait headline generator, or animated strands of your DNA, these simple, text-based programs are small – limited to 256 lines of code or less – and designed to be self-contained in a single source-code file so you can easily post and share them online.

You’ll create:

• Hangman, Blackjack and other games to play against a computer or your friends
• Simulations of a spreading forest fire, a million dice rolls, and a Japanese abacus
• Animation programs, like a fish tank, a rotating cube, and a bouncing DVD logo
• Mazes that you design then escape from, and a 3D Maze Runner-like video game
• Encryption programs that use ciphers like ROT13 and Vigenère to conceal text

For those who’ve mastered basic Python syntax and are ready to have fun making programs, the projects in this book will spark new ideas for what’s possible within just a few pages of code.

"I've always been impressed by the variety of simple, but interesting and fun, projects Al can come up with and this collection takes that to the next level. . . . Even experienced coders are likely to be pulled into browsing through the wide variety that Al has put into this book."

—Naomi Ceder, author of The Quick Python Book and Fellow of the Python Software Foundation

"Al Sweigart presents fun programs, inspiring learners to tweak them. That's how I learned to program: tinkering with examples from books and magazines. It works!"

—Luciano Ramalho, Technical Principal at ThoughtWorks and author of Fluent Python

"Whether you're new to Python or want to exercise your coding brain, I recommend The Big Book of Small Python Projects to spark your thinking. Both the 'big' and the 'small' in the title are accurate. There are a lot of projects in this book, but most code takes up only a page or two. That makes it a fun reference book to get you into the flow or kick off a session in your terminal."

—Adam DuVander, Founder, EveryDeveloper

"This book is excellent for beginners to Python and a great reference book for programmers who are well versed in programming. I'm happy to give this book 5 out of 5 stars!"

—Greg Walters, Full Circle Magazine

"This book is packed with fun and easy programs, I can confirm."

—BC Gain, @bcamerongain

Chapters:
Introduction
Project 1 - Bagels
Project 2 - Birthday Paradox
Project 3 - Bitmap Message
Project 4 - Blackjack
Project 5 - Bouncing DVD Logo
Project 6 - Caesar Cipher
Project 7 - Caesar Hacker
Project 8 - Calendar Maker
Project 9 - Carrot in a Box
Project 10 - Cho-Han
Project 11 - Clickbait Headline Generator
Project 12 - Collatz Sequence
Project 13 - Conway's Game of Life
Project 14 - Countdown
Project 15 - Deep Cave
Project 16 - Diamonds
Project 17 - Dice Math
Project 18 - Dice Roller
Project 19 - Digital Clock
Project 20 - Digital Stream
Project 21 - DNA Visualization
Project 22 - Ducklings
Project 23 - Etching Drawer
Project 24 - Factor Finder
Project 25 - Fast Draw
Project 26 - Fibonacci
Project 27 - Fish Tank
Project 28 - Flooder
Project 29 - Forest Fire Sim
Project 30 - Four in a Row
Project 31 - Guess the Number
Project 32 - Gullible
Project 33 - Hacking Minigame
Project 34 - Hangman & Guillotine
Project 35 - Hex Grid
Project 36 - Hourglass
Project 37 - Hungry Robots
Project 38 - J'Accuse! Project 39 - Langton's Ant Project 40 - Leetspeak Project 41 - Lucky Stars Project 42 - Magic Fortune Ball Project 43 - Mancala
Project 44 - Maze Runner 2D
Project 45 - Maze Runner 3D
Project 46 - Million Dice Statistics
Project 47 - Mondrian Art Generator
Project 48 - Monty Hall
Project 49 - Multiplication Table
Project 50 - Ninety Nine Bottles
Project 51 - niNety nniinE BoOttels
Project 52 - Numeral Systems
Project 53 - Periodic Table of the Elements
Project 54 - Pig Latin
Project 55 - Powerball Lottery
Project 56 - Prime Numbers
Project 57 - Progress Bar
Project 58 - Rainbow
Project 59 - Rock Paper Scissors
Project 60 - Rock Paper Scissors (Always-Win Version)
Project 61 - ROT 13 Cipher
Project 62 - Rotating Cube
Project 63 - Royal Game of Ur
Project 64 - Seven-Segment Display Module
Project 65 - Shining Carpet
Project 66 - Simple Substitution Cipher
Project 67 - Sine Message
Project 68 - Sliding Tile Puzzle
Project 69 - Snail Race
Project 70 - Soroban Japanese Abacus
Project 71 - Sound Mimic
Project 72 - sPoNgEcAsE
Project 73 - Sudoku Puzzle
Project 74 - Text To Speech Talker
Project 75 - Three-Card Monte
Project 76 - Tic-Tac-Toe
Project 77 - Tower of Hanoi Puzzle
Project 78 - Trick Questions
Project 79 - Twenty Forty Eight
Project 80 - Vigenère Cipher
Project 81 - Water Bucket Puzzle
Appendix A - Tag Index
Appendix B - Character Map