A few years ago, I noticed that many of the participants in my corporate Python courses were asking the same question: How can I get additional practice?
And I have to say, this question made a lot of sense. After all, you can only absorb so much information from a course, regardless of how good it is. It’s only through repeated practice that you really gain the mastery and fluency that you need. This is true in sports. This is true in language. This is true in crossword puzzles. And it’s true in programming — even in a language as straightforward as Python.
Thus was born “Practice Makes Python,” my first ebook. That ebook became a course with accompanying videos. Those led me to write another book, a bunch of additional video courses (with many more on the way), and (of course) Weekly Python Exercise, now a family of six 15-week courses.
Well, I have exciting news to announce today: “Practice Makes Python” has undergone massive editing and expansion, and is being republished by Manning as “Python Workout.”
How has it changed?
- It now uses Python 3 exclusively.
- I’ve added many diagrams and figures.
- Just about every exercise has a link to PythonTutor.com, where you can follow the code yourself, line by line.
- There are numerous sidebars, describing aspects of Python’s functionality that you might not have understood previously.
- After presenting my solution to an exercise, I then present three additional “beyond the exercise” challenges.
- It has gone through a lot of editing by people with a great of experience in the editing and publishing worlds.
The book was just released as a MEAP (“Manning Early Access Program”), which means that it’s available as an online book today, with three of the 10 chapters already online. The next three chapters should be released within the next 1-2 months, and the full book should be done (if all goes well) by September or October. The videos are still, for the time being, the old ones that use Python 2 — but will be replaced in the coming months, as well.
If you buy the MEAP, you’ll have access to these updates as they happen, and will also be able to tell me what worked well… and what didn’t. You can be sure that I’m always experimenting with my exercises, trying to figure out how to get the questions, the tasks, and the explanations to be a bit more effective and useful to people.
If this sounds good, then I want to make it even better: As a reader of my blog, you can get 50% off “Python Workout” by using the promo code mllerner50 . Note that this promo code is good for all Manning books, in all formats (online and print). So if you see other things you like, go wild!
Once again: Get “Python Workout” for 50% off with the promo code mllerner50 !