The Big Book of Small Python Projects: 81 Easy Practice Programs

The book is a collection of easy to understand algorithms design to teach the reader how to use python to solve everyday problems. It would be an excellent way to learn this language by working through the examples given, I have bough t a couple of books by this author and he does an excellent job of writing a text book. His books are written as if they were college text books.

After finishing one of the other intro books by this author, I was immediately on the hunt for more example/practice problems. It's amazing that he has this separate book with exactly that. These mini projects help build skills but also provide creative and enjoyable programming challenges.

this is a collection of very simple python projects.good to give you some ideas to start with to design more interesting coding puzzles.All projects are text based even the ones with titles suggesting a graphical component.just basic python with very limited use of additional libraries.a good collection for beginners to wet your toes.

I'm a programmer who sometimes struggles to go from idea to a concrete program. This book works to help that problem on two levels. First, it shows you some simple algorithms and tools that can be used for stuff like graphics and movement. Second, it acts as a great reference for if you have an idea in the future, but are struggling on how to implement the idea. On top of that, the book is really good for getting the creative juices flowing. I highly recommend

Acquiring programming skills is a difficult task because it has to do directly with the way we think about things, and also because it has many layers of specialization and depth. But it is particularly difficult in the first steps, where you want to turn a set of abstract concepts into solutions to concrete problems. For many, this transition is frustrating because most of the content in the education system is about memorization and repetition. The Big Book of Small Python Projects seeks to help fill that gap for people who are just starting to program by providing examples of small but large enough programs to generate a sense of accomplishment.This is the latest book by Al Sweigart, an author who enjoys great popularity and recognition, on his website inventwithpython.com you can find a good number of books ranging from a book that invites us to learn programming by developing simple video games "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" which is already in its fourth edition, to a book of best practices for professionals "Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python". One of his books "Automate Boring Stuff with Python", which has sold around 300 thousand copies on Amazon, is one of those books that anyone would think that someone should have written before, but no one had dared to do it, here we are guided on the basic tasks to work with resources that are common to almost everyone: working on the file system, manipulating office documents, and interacting with Internet resources.Sweigart's formula is consistent and effective: we start by reviewing the solution to the problem, which invites us to think about how everything must work behind the scenes, and then he shows us in greater or lesser detail how this solution was constructed. It is obvious that he is not the inventor of this method nor is he the only one who has used it in programming, other good examples are the books "Dive into Python" by Mark Pilgrim where a similar formula is applied with great success.In "The Big Book" this methodology is applied systematically throughout 81 programs ordered alphabetically, following a brief introduction we find three sections: "The Program in Action" where the author shows an example of program execution, then in "How It Works" he shows us the source code just mentioning implementation details, and "Exploring the Program" where he asks some questions to encourage the reader to deepen the understanding of the program or in some cases, extend it. Most probably the author's intention is not that we advance sequentially from beginning to end, but that among the large number of topics we work on those that call our attention, in this sense it is very useful Appendix A: "Tag Index" where he shows us a classification of the programs based on two systems: by length, and by characteristics.The result is not a book that intends to explain how Python works, or how programs are built, this has already been done by Sweigart in his previous books, especially in "Invent Your Own Computer Games". "The Big Book of Small Python Projects" should be understood more as a guide to lab experiments where you are given directions on an activity that you should do yourself, or perhaps ideally in a group with friends or work/study colleagues. In this sense, it would not be unreasonable for me to see a Wiki or a GitHub repository where people could post observations or variants of the programs.Personally, I have very much enjoyed all his books, and have recommended them all at one time or another. And I am also too close to his pedagogical approach that I have largely incorporated into my work as a teacher to offer an objective viewpoint. There are some implementation details that are not to my liking, such as the use of lowerCamelCase for naming variables, functions and methods, which contradicts the PEP8 that most use, or the preferential use of the format method rather than f-strings, but there is an open invitation here for everyone to adjust it to their liking. Beyond any captious remarks, I recommend this book without reservation, not only for individual reading but also as a basis for various collective activities. For example, as a source of ideas for a programming club or a programming camp, as complementary material for a professional training process, and even as inspiration to study other programming languages, I personally have been using it to study Scala.

I am a self-taught Python programmer. My learning has come from a variety of online resources including Pluralsight online courses, Udemy online courses, and all of the books by Al Sweigart. If you're a total 100% newbie to Python you can learn from this book but it assumes a level of knowledge so your journey will be more challenging and I would recommend his earlier books before this one.Regardless this a great learning resource. Al does a great job of providing fun coding projects along with good explanations. In this book those explanations are more along the lines of "This is what the program does", showing the code, and then offering you examples of how to change the code and observe the changes to help you actually understand what the code is doing and how the program works as a whole.If you're needing more explanation of the code itself, as I stated, start with an earlier book. If you already a base, beginner level of Python understanding, then this book will definitely let you dig deeper into Python and improve your learning and is worth the read.While you may be able to get the code to copy and paste from an online book or other source, I recommend typing the code out. It helps enforce things in your brain and fingers and I still always type every single line of code. This also helps with your debugging skills because invariably there will be a typo somewhere you'll have to track down and fix. :-)

The Big Book of Small Python Projects is an outstanding resource for Python enthusiasts looking to sharpen their programming skills. This book offers 81 easy practice programs that provide a perfect balance between simplicity and depth, making it accessible to both beginners and intermediate programmers.

Good for kids. The print quality is good.

Loved the descriptions accompanying each project

So I typed in all the code from the book into the IDE, ran the code but the projects don’t run as intended.Don’t waste your money on this crap.