My 19 Days of Python: Day 2

I'm tempted to call Day 2 of My 19 Days of Python, "You had me at 'unladen swallow.'"

Authors like to tell their readers a little bit about themselves in their books and Allen Downey is no exception. In reading Chapter 2: Variables, Expressions, and Statements, in his book Think Python, I discovered that he likes Monty Python and particularly their Holy Grail film, he's a runner, (based on "running" related exercises in the first two chapters of the book) and he (groan) likes math word problems.

Of course the Monty Python references in Chapter 2 could also be a subtle nod to the fact that the Python programming language is named after the comedy troupe and not the snake. But I'm sure all this isn't why you visited my blog today.

One of the other things I discovered about Downey's book on Day 2 is that exercises and conceptual content are intermixed within the chapter, at least up to a point. Most books that purport to teach you programming usually tell you about a particular topic in the first 90% of the chapter and save all of the exercises for the end. This typically forces the reader to go over an exercise and then thumb back to the relevant sections of the chapter to try and acquire the clues that will let them solve an exercise (which can be a real pain in books that have chapters that are 70 pages long).

When I encountered Exercise 2.1 on pages 14-15, I thought I had a handle on what the solution might be, but I couldn't be sure. I noticed in going over the book previously that there's no "answer" section, either at the end of the chapter or at the end of the book. I know that text books won't always have the answers to the exercises, and publishers in that case, will provide an instructor's edition of the book for the class teacher. I thought that kind of lets out those of us who are working at home, but maybe I was being unfair. Sometimes the author provides a website for the book with additional material, including help with the exercises.

The good news is that Downey does have a site for "Think Python." The bad news is that it wasn't what I expected: http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/. There's more and different material that I certainly want to explore at a later date, but nothing that I could immediately apply to my "Day 2" experience. Fortunately I remembered that "Google is your friend" and discovered the solution to Exercise 2.1 at stackoverflow.com. (Sorry if I'm giving too much information away, but this series is supposed to be my unabridged thoughts and feelings as I move through each of my "Python days.")

I discovered that there are things about Python that can't be crammed into 300 pages and bitwise operators is one of them. That's OK since I'm still working on riding this bicycle with training wheels attached.

Downey introduced the concept of variables and then let me explore how variables work in an elementary way on the command line. The same for operators and operands, and expressions and statements. In just nine pages, I wasn't going to get a lot of practice. This seems just enough to give the reader a taste of what a concept is, what it means, and a tiny experience on how it works (and what happens when it doesn't work).

Exercise 2.2 requires that the reader run a small bit of code, both in interactive mode and in script mode. What may not be obvious to the rank beginner is that they will need to know how to create a script using a text editor, save the text file with a .py extension, and then on the command line, navigate to the location of the .py file and run it (you can't be in interactive mode on the command line when you run a script). Downey briefly mentioned this in Chapter 1, but most other beginning programming books will make this rather overt. For the sake of the total newbie, some step-by-step instructions, either in Chapter 1 or in the Introduction would be helpful.

The Order of Operations section sent me all the way back to ancient days and Algebra (not my most pleasant memories but after all, I am a writer, not a calculator). Somewhere in the book, Downey may have mentioned that 2**3 turns out to be 2³, but I don't remember where. It's important to understand this in order to perform one of exercises at the end of the book. If you suffer from chronic "mathphobia" or some similar malady, you may feel a bit of a twinge at this point in the chapter.

Looks like there will be a Debugging section in each chapter pointing to common problems or errors the reader may encounter. In the case of Chapter 2, common errors will be using illegal variable names or illegal characters. Add to that the common (for me) error of using a single quote at the begining of a string and a double-quote at the end such as, 'this is a bad string". Oops.

SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal

Exercise 2.3 gave me some practice with variable assignments and made me remember how to find the types of values (str, float, or int) I was working with. Exercise 2.4 contained three "evil" math word problems. I finally worked my way through the problems but it was more like a basic Algebra tutorial than learning how to program. Either the emphasis on math problems is because knowing how to solve these little puzzles is required for later chapters in the book, or because Downey just likes math word problems.

Suffice it to say that I augmented my ability to complete the exercises with a certain amount of searching on Google. Do I know more about programming at the end of Day 2? I suppose, but I still feel like I'm just skirting around the edges of Python, programming, and "thinking" computer science. Actually, I feel more like I'm back in high school, and I never wanted to take the Wayback Machine down that part of my history again.

We'll see what Day 3 brings.