Python tasks for self-study

Getting started with Python

List of recommended literature according to your level and a piece of advice from me.

Introduction

This repository contains Python tasks which might help to improve your Python level. I'm going to add different tasks based on books, sites, real live examples. Some of them might be tricky or not-well described. Feel free to ask any question or add pull requests with clarification. I try hard to add interesting tasks so sometimes it requires a time. Moreover, I highly recommend to perform final task pyttleship.

Not to mention the fact, that main goal of this tasks is to use only Python standard library. Most of all tasks designed for python2.7 but can be easily performed for 3th version of Python.

Conventions

Here are notes about code conventions.

Python examples

Usually python examples contain code and expected output in the python interactive shell.

Basic example:

from itertools import permutations
gen = permutations('abc', 2)

Another interactive example with exception:

>>> with open('/tmp/file.txt') as fd:
...     data = fd.read()
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/tmp/file.txt'
>>> print(list(gen))
[('a', 'b'), ('a', 'c'), ('b', 'a'), ('b', 'c'), ('c', 'a'), ('c', 'b')]

Bash examples

Usually all bash commands start with PS1 prompt. It is a $ sign for basic user. In case we need a root privilege prompt will be a # sign.

$ curl -i http://localhost:8000/api/jobs

Long commands are wrapped with backslash to avoid scrolling. All lines which belong to the command are indented using four spaces to distinguish with command output. For example:

$ curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -d '{"command": "cp /tmp/file /mnt/nfs/"}' http://localhost:8000/api/jobs
HTTP/1.0 202 Accepted
Location: /api/statuses/45

Python tasks

Functions and generators

• Very simple function factory.
• Generator for downloading topics from reddit using closure.
• Function and generator for expanding nested sequences.
• Enhanced version of existing zip functions.

Subprocess and regular expressions

• Curses based ssh config file viewer.

REST service and threading

• REST service for background job execution.
• Enhancements for existing REST service.

Multiprocess grep and word counter

• Word counter in text files.
• Simple analogue of Linux grep command.

Descriptors and ORM concept

• Person descriptor with value checking.
• Non-data descriptor for printing documentation.
• Implementation basic ORM using descriptors.

Class linter and cache metaclasses

• Linter metaclass for checking class documentation and attribute names.
• Cache metaclass for caching long calculations results

Coming soon (not described ideas)...

• Descriptors and properties.
• Plug-ins in python.
• Python reminder for linux.

Battleship game

Pyttleship is python implementation of world-popular game Battleship. The main idea of Pyttleship is to gather all tasks described above and build interesting network game. At first look this game seems quite simple but during thinking about the future game architecture many questions will arise.

Happy codding!