This tutorial will guide you through a fun project involving complex numbers in Python. You’re going to learn about fractals and create some truly stunning art by drawing the Mandelbrot set using Python’s Matplotlib and Pillow libraries. Along the way, you’ll learn how this famous fractal was discovered, what it represents, and how it relates to other fractals. Knowing about object-oriented programming principles and recursion will enable you to take full advantage of Python’s expressive syntax to write clean code […]

You’re stuck inside because of torrential rains—again! You wonder what the weather’s like in that faraway city where your friends from the Real Python community live. You’d rather stick around in your command-line interface (CLI) than look it up in your browser. If that sounds like a task you’d want to tackle by building a command-line weather app using only the Python standard library, then this tutorial is for you. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to: Build a functional […]

You have a large CSV, you’re going to be reading it in to Pandas—but every time you load it, you have to wait for the CSV to load. And that slows down your development feedback loop, and might meaningfully slows down your production processing. But it’s faster to read the data in faster. Let’s see how. In this article we’ll cover: Pandas’ default CSV reading. The faster, more parallel CSV reader introduced in v1.4. A different approach that can make […]

If you’re writing modern Python code with Python 3, you’ll probably want to format your strings with Python f-strings. However, if you’re working with older Python codebases, you’re likely to encounter the string modulo operator for string formatting. If you’re reading or writing Python 2 code, it’ll help if you’re familiar with this technique. Because the syntax still works in Python 3, you might even see developers use it in modern Python codebases. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to: […]

Python is not the fastest programming language. So when you need to process a large amount of homogeneous data quickly, you’re told to rely on “vectorization.” This leads to more questions: What does “vectorization” actually mean? When does it apply? How does vectorization actually make code faster? To answer that question, we’ll consider interesting performance metrics, learn some useful facts about how CPUs work, and discover that NumPy developers are working hard to make your code faster. What “vectorization” means, […]

Building small projects, like a text-based user interface (TUI) dice-rolling application, will help you level up your Python programming skills. You’ll learn how to gather and validate the user’s input, import code from modules and packages, write functions, use for loops and conditionals, and neatly display output by using strings and the print() function. In this project, you’ll code an application that simulates dice-rolling events. To do so, you’ll use Python’s random module. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to: […]

In December 2021, the fourth Python steering council was elected, as usual with a mix of new and returning members. Python’s release-cycle circle of life kept spinning, with new iterations of both Python 3.10 and the upcoming Python 3.11 released. At the same time, the popular Python 3.6 reached end-of-life and will no longer be supported. Amid this flurry of activity, developers from all over had some fun over the holidays by solving the annual Advent of Code puzzles. Let’s […]