Learn Python by writing games (free book)

by larrykubin • 17 years ago

85 10 17 years ago

jacquesm• 17 years ago

That's a great way to get kids in to programming, games are very low 'barrier to entry' and as they get more sophisticated will cause the wanna be programmer to pick up a whole pile of knowledge about other fields (such as physics) as well.

Highly recommended, and at that price you really can't go wrong :)

zackattack• 17 years ago

I remember writing Tic Tac Toe in BASIC. Way better to get started in python.

nimrody• 17 years ago

Might be easier to use Javascript for this purpose since it is available practically everywhere. And HTML Canvas support makes writing graphics/games very easy.

See http://billmill.org/static/canvastutorial/index.html for example.

selven• 17 years ago

I have written very many games using Python and Pygame. Very nice language (I like the syntax much better than the C-like languages) and tools.

If you're going to do this, there is one very important tip: use psyco. It ( http://psyco.sourceforge.net/ ) magically speeds up all Python execution by about 3-4x. In one of my games ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/slasha/ , still in its early stages) the millisecond per frame count went from 25-300 to 15-80 (drawing the desktop seems to take an unavoidable 7-10 ms).

As for what you learn doing this kind of thing, you use trigonometry a lot, you use the pythagorean theorem a lot, my game here is the way I thought up of the pathfinding algorithm.

illumen• 17 years ago

Very nice! So many people first started making little games on their computers, it makes sense to teach people this way.

rbanffy• 17 years ago

Seems to be a very good book. I would love to help translate it into Portuguese so kids around me could make use of it.

If there's still time, I would suggest not using the box image for variables. I prefer label tags because the box analogy assumes certain objects fit in certain boxes and is, thus, typed (unlike Python, where objects have types and names are just names). Also, an object can be contained in a single box while any number of labels can be attached to any object.

cabalamat2• 17 years ago

I agree. Labels better capture how Python works, because the assignmest statement causes another variable to point to the same object instead of copying the object, e.g.:

  >>> a = [1,2]
  >>> b = a
  >>> a[0]='h'
  >>> b
  ['h', 2]

cool-RR• 17 years ago

This might be a good place to mention my project again:

http://pythonturtle.org

It's not nearly as comprehensive as Invent with Python, but it also attempts to deal with the challenge of giving a low 'barrier to entry' to learning Python.

cabalamat2• 17 years ago

One problem with this book is it doesn't teach good programming style. For example, the program in chapter 19 is 200 lines of code that doesn't use procedures anywhere -- it's all in one big lump of code.

This is bad, because when novice programmers try to modify the program, they will quickly find it becomes unmaintainable.

sam191• 17 years ago

I was going to recommend this book to my younger brother. However, I changed my mind shortly after discovering that this book does not cover classes! I might not be an expert, but almost every Python program I've read uses classes, and I think it would be difficult for a beginner to read the code of others after finishing this book.

Learn Python by writing games (free book)

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