A Reluctant Guide to a Language That Uses Whitespace as Syntax
Look, we're all here for different reasons. Maybe your boss told you to learn Python. Maybe you lost a bet. Maybe you just hate yourself a little bit. Whatever brought you here, welcome to the support group.
This book teaches Python to people who:
- Already know how to program in a real language (one with curly braces)
- Miss semicolons like old friends who moved away
- Think significant whitespace is what happens when your spacebar gets stuck
- Would rather be writing Ruby but the job market said "lol no"
- The Great Indentation Disaster of 1991
- Why Guido van Rossum Hurt Us This Way
- Setting Up Your Therapy Session (Development Environment)
- Everything is an Object (Even Your Disappointment)
- Dynamic Typing: Because Who Needs Compile-Time Safety?
- The Walrus Operator := (Yes, That's Really What It's Called)
- If Statements: The Art of Significant Indentation
- Loops: While You Question Your Life Choices
- The Else Clause on Loops (Because Python)
- F-Strings: Python's One Good Idea
- Triple Quotes: For When You Have a Lot to Say
- String Methods That Almost Make Sense
- Lists: Mutable Arrays That Wish They Were Ruby Arrays
- Tuples: Immutable Lists That Nobody Asked For
- List Comprehensions: One-Liners That Make You Feel Smart
- Dictionaries: At Least These Are Useful
- Sets: For When You Want Unique Disappointments
- The Mysterious OrderedDict (Spoiler: All Dicts Are Ordered Now)
- Default Arguments: The Mutable Default Trap
- *args and **kwargs: When You've Given Up on Type Safety
- Lambda Functions: Anonymous Functions Nobody Can Read
- What Even Is a Decorator?
- Writing Your Own Decorators (Don't)
- Common Decorators That Actually Matter
- The Eternal Mystery of
self __init__and Other Dunder Methods- Why Everything Needs Double Underscores
- Single Inheritance: At Least It's Not Multiple
- Super() and the Method Resolution Order
- Abstract Base Classes: Python Pretends to Have Interfaces
- Yield: Not Just for Traffic
- Generator Expressions: List Comprehensions' Lazy Cousin
- The Iterator Protocol: Making Things Iterable
- What's a Context Manager?
- Writing Your Own (But Why?)
- Common Context Managers You'll Actually Use
- Asyncio: Making Simple Things Complicated Since 2014
- Async/Await: JavaScript Refugees Will Feel at Home
- When to Use Async (Spoiler: Less Often Than You Think)
- pip: Installing Packages and Breaking Things
- Virtual Environments: Because Global Installation is Too Easy
- Poetry, Pipenv, and Other Tools That Promise to Fix Everything
- unittest: Java Programmers Will Feel at Home
- pytest: The Actually Good Testing Framework
- Mocking: Pretending Your Code Works
- You've Learned Python (Unfortunately)
- Career Opportunities in Suffering
- Resources for Continued Disappointment
Each chapter includes:
- Reluctant explanations of Python concepts
- Bitter comparisons to better languages
- Actual working code (despite our complaints)
- Exercises titled "Try Not to Cry"
- Basic programming knowledge in any language with curly braces
- A sense of humor about your poor life choices
- A therapist on speed dial
- Coffee (lots of it)
The author is a programmer who was perfectly happy writing Ruby until the job market had other ideas. They now write Python professionally while secretly maintaining a Ruby shrine in their closet.
This book is distributed under the "Whatever, It's Python" license. Do what you want with it. We're all suffering together.