Python 3.11 is getting closer to its final release, which will happen in October 2022. The new version is currently going through beta testing, and you can install it yourself to preview and test some of the new features, including support for reading TOML with the new tomllib module. TOML is a configuration file format that’s getting more and more popular in the Python ecosystem. This is driven by the adoption of pyproject.toml as the central configuration file in Python […]

Queues are the backbone of numerous algorithms found in games, artificial intelligence, satellite navigation, and task scheduling. They’re among the top abstract data types that computer science students learn early in their education. At the same time, software engineers often leverage higher-level message queues to achieve better scalability of a microservice architecture. Plus, using queues in Python is simply fun! Python provides a few built-in flavors of queues that you’ll see in action in this tutorial. You’re also going to […]

Playing computer games is a great way to unwind or challenge yourself. Some people even do it professionally. It’s also fun and educational to build your own computer games. In this tutorial, you’ll build a classic tic-tac-toe game using Python and Tkinter. With this project, you’ll go through the thought processes required for creating your own game. You’ll also learn how to integrate your diverse programming skills and knowledge to develop a functional and fun computer game. In this tutorial, […]

Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Testing Your Code With pytest Testing your code brings a wide variety of benefits. It increases your confidence that the code behaves as you expect and ensures that changes to your code won’t cause regressions. Writing and maintaining tests is hard work, so you should leverage all the tools at your disposal to make […]

One of the promises of Docker is reproducibility: you can build an image on a different machine, and assuming you’ve done the appropriate setup, get the same result. So it can be a little confusing when you try to build your Python-based Dockerfile on a new Mac, and everything starts failing. What used to work before—on an older Mac, or on a Linux machine—fails in completely unexpected ways. The problem is that the promise of reproducibility relies on certain invariants […]

If you came to Python from a language like C, C++, Java, or JavaScript, then you may be missing their do-while loop construct. A do-while loop is a common control flow statement that executes its code block at least once, regardless of whether the loop condition is true or false. This behavior relies on the fact that the loop condition is evaluated at the end of each iteration. So, the first iteration always runs. One of the most common use […]

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to quickly build documentation for a Python package using MkDocs and mkdocstrings. These tools allow you to generate nice-looking and modern documentation from Markdown files and your code’s docstrings. Maintaining auto-generated documentation means less effort because you’re linking information between your code and the documentation pages. However, good documentation is more than just the technical description pulled from your code! Your project will appeal more to users if you guide them through examples and […]