Chris is the founder of the programming education company FINXTER, author of the Coffee Break Python series of self-published books, the popular programming book Python One-Liners (NoStarch 2020), a doctorate computer scientist, and owner of one of the top 10 Python blogs worldwide. His research interests include graph theory and distributed systems. You can join … Read more
This tutorial gives you a short explanation of the Law of Demeter. It’s based on a rough chapter draft for my upcoming book “The Art of Clean Code” to appear with NoStarch in 2022. Overview You’ve already learned that one of the most important reasons for code complexity is interdependency. To write clean code, you … Read more
This tutorial taken from my upcoming programming book “From One to Zero” (NoStarch, 2021) will show you how to write great comments. While most online tutorials focus on a bullet list of commenting tips, we dive deeper into the meat exploring the underlying reasons for the commonly recommended commenting principles. So, let’s get started! Code … Read more
What keeps you going day after day? Your motivation is the most important building block of your success. In the following, I’d like to give you some fact-based motivation why creating your coding business online can easily be the most rewarding decision in your life. Yet, motivation is not everything. If you want to make … Read more
Introduction In this tutorial, we will explore numerous examples of using the BeautifulSoup library in Python. For a better understanding let us follow a few guidelines/steps that will help us to simplify things and produce an efficient code. Please have a look at the framework/steps that we are going to follow in all the examples … Read more
The line plot is the most iconic of all the plots. To draw one in matplotlib, use the plt.plot() function and pass it a list of numbers used as the y-axis values. Per default, the x-axis values are the list indexes of the passed line. Matplotlib automatically connects the points with a blue line per … Read more
Scatter plots are a key tool in any Data Analyst’s arsenal. If you want to see the relationship between two variables, you are usually going to make a scatter plot. In this article, you’ll learn the basic and intermediate concepts to create stunning matplotlib scatter plots. Minimal Scatter Plot Example The following code shows a … Read more
The pandas.concat( ) function combines the data from multiple Series and/or DataFrames fast and in an intuitive manner. It is one of the most basic data wrangling operations used in Pandas. In general, we draw some conclusions from the data by analyzing it. The confidence in our conclusions increases as we include more variables or … Read more
Writing code in Python is not always an easy task. Often writing “perfect” code without any errors is nothing more than a coder’s daydream. Allow me to introduce you to a little function programmers use to debug their code called the breakpoint() function. Now there are several tools a programmer can use in their coding … Read more
When I first learned about regular expressions, I didn’t really appreciate their power. But there’s a reason regular expressions have survived seven decades of technological disruption: coders who understand regular expressions have a massive advantage when working with textual data. They can write in a single line of code what takes others dozens! This article … Read more
You may encounter a special ValueError when working with Python’s math module. Python raises this error when you try to do something that is not mathematically possible or mathematically defined. To understand this error, have a look at the definition of the domain: “The domain of a function is the complete set of possible values … Read more
Why have regular expressions survived seven decades of technological disruption? Because coders who understand regular expressions have a massive advantage when working with textual data. They can write in a single line of code what takes others dozens! This article is all about the re.match() method of Python’s re library. There are two similar methods to … Read more