The incredible amount of data on the Internet is a rich resource for any field of research or personal interest. To effectively harvest that data, you’ll need to become skilled at web scraping. The Python libraries requests and Beautiful Soup are powerful tools for the job. If you like to learn with hands-on examples and you have a basic understanding of Python and HTML, then this tutorial is for you. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to: Use requests and […]

Most general-purpose programming languages have either no support or limited support for complex numbers. Your typical options are learning some specialized tool like MATLAB or finding a third-party library. Python is a rare exception because it comes with complex numbers built in. Despite the name, complex numbers aren’t complicated! They’re convenient in tackling practical problems that you’ll get a taste of in this tutorial. You’ll explore vector graphics and sound frequency analysis, but complex numbers can also help in drawing […]

Linear algebra is widely used across a variety of subjects, and you can use it to solve many problems once you organize the information using concepts like vectors and linear equations. In Python, most of the routines related to this subject are implemented in scipy.linalg, which offers very fast linear algebra capabilities. In particular, linear systems play an important role in modeling a variety of real-world problems, and scipy.linalg provides tools to study and solve them in an efficient way. […]

The with statement in Python is a quite useful tool for properly managing external resources in your programs. It allows you to take advantage of existing context managers to automatically handle the setup and teardown phases whenever you’re dealing with external resources or with operations that require those phases. Besides, the context management protocol allows you to create your own context managers so you can customize the way you deal with system resources. So, what’s the with statement good for? […]

An important part of working with data is being able to visualize it. Python has several third-party modules you can use for data visualization. One of the most popular modules is Matplotlib and its submodule pyplot, often referred to using the alias plt. Matplotlib provides a very versatile tool called plt.scatter() that allows you to create both basic and more complex scatter plots. Below, you’ll walk through several examples that will show you how to use the function effectively. In […]

If you’re familiar with functions in Python, then you know that it’s quite common for one function to call another. In Python, it’s also possible for a function to call itself! A function that calls itself is said to be recursive, and the technique of employing a recursive function is called recursion. It may seem peculiar for a function to call itself, but many types of programming problems are best expressed recursively. When you bump up against such a problem, […]

Creating applications with a user-friendly command-line interface (CLI) is a useful skill for a Python developer. With this skill, you can create tools to automate and speed up tasks in your working environment. In this tutorial, you’ll build a Python directory tree generator tool for your command line. The application will take a directory path as an argument at the command line and display a directory tree diagram on your screen. It’ll also provide other options to tweak the output. […]

Sometimes you need a Python dictionary that remembers the order of its items. In the past, you had only one tool for solving this specific problem: Python’s OrderedDict. It’s a dictionary subclass specially designed to remember the order of items, which is defined by the insertion order of keys. This changed in Python 3.6. The built-in dict class now keeps its items ordered as well. Because of that, many in the Python community now wonder if OrderedDict is still useful. […]

Do you want to create your own computer games but like Python too much to abandon it for a career as a game developer? There’s a solution for that! With the Pygame module, you can use your amazing Python skills to create games, from the basic to the very complex. Below, you’ll learn how to use Pygame by making a clone of the Asteroids game! In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a complete game, including: Loading images and […]

To create a GUI for your windows and dialogs in PyQt, you can take two main paths: you can use Qt Designer, or you can hand code the GUI in plain Python code. The first path can dramatically improve your productivity, whereas the second path puts you in full control of your application’s code. GUI applications often consist of a main window and several dialogs. If you’re looking to create these graphical components in an efficient and user-friendly way, then […]