Python makes extensive use of a type system known as duck typing. The system is based on objects’ behaviors and interfaces. Many built-in classes and tools support this type system, which makes them pretty flexible and decoupled. Duck typing is a core concept in Python. Learning about the topic will help you understand how the language works and, more importantly, how to use this approach in your own code. In this tutorial, you’ll learn: What duck typing is and what […]

Climate change is impacting the whole planet, and getting worse every year. So you want to do something—but you’re not sure what. If you do some research you might encounter an essay by Bret Victor—What can a technologist do about climate change? There’s a whole pile of good ideas in there, and it’s worth reading, but the short version is that you can use technology to “create options for policy-makers.” And working on clean energy or efficiency is definitely a […]

You may often want to make your Python programs more interactive by responding dynamically to input from the user. Learning how to read user input from the keyboard unlocks exciting possibilities and can make your code far more useful. The ability to gather input from the keyboard with Python allows you to build programs that can respond uniquely based on the preferences, decisions, or data provided by different users. By fetching input and assigning it to variables, your code can […]

If you’re doing computations on a GPU, NVIDIA is the default, alongside its CUDA libraries. Some libraries like PyTorch support do support AMD GPUs and Macs. But from the re-implementations of NumPy, SciPy, and Pandas in the RAPIDS project, to Numba’s GPU support, NVIDIA has best software support in the Python world. Sticking to NVIDIA-specific software has some downsides, however: It won’t run on modern Mac laptops. Testing in CI is more difficult: you need custom runners that have NVIDIA […]

While reading the Python documentation, you may have found fragments of BNF notation (Backus–Naur form) that look something like the following: What’s the meaning of all this strange code? How can this help you in understanding Python concepts? How can you read and interpret this notation? In this tutorial, you’ll get to know the basics of Python’s BNF notation and learn how to take advantage of it to get a deep understanding of the language’s syntax and grammar. To get […]

In this tutorial on Python decorators, you’ll learn what they are and how to create and use them. Decorators provide a simple syntax for calling higher-order functions. By definition, a decorator is a function that takes another function and extends the behavior of the latter function without explicitly modifying it. This sounds confusing, but it’ll make more sense after you’ve seen a few examples of how decorators work. You can find all the examples from this tutorial by downloading the […]

PEP 8, sometimes spelled PEP8 or PEP-8, is a document that provides guidelines and best practices on how to write Python code. It was written in 2001 by Guido van Rossum, Barry Warsaw, and Alyssa Coghlan. The primary focus of PEP 8 is to improve the readability and consistency of Python code. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to: Write Python code that conforms to PEP 8 Understand the reasoning behind the guidelines laid out in PEP […]