I believe you can learn serious things through silly games.

I'd like to make this into a book or something, similar to the Python bioinformatics/data science (https://github.com/kyclark/practical_python_for_data_science) repo. I think you will learn best by doing, so I think I will write this as a loose collection of exercises that spell out the skills I aim to teach with each exercise. I will create descriptions for each exercise with examples of how the program should work along with a test suite. You will need to write the program that satisfies the test suite.

I think I'm going to present this differently from other material in that I won't necessarily show you beforehand what you need to write a program. I'll describe what the program should do and provide some discussion about how to write it. I'll also create an appendix with short example of how to do things like read/write from/to a file, process all the files in a directory, extract k-mers from a string, etc. I'll provide some building blocks, but I want you to figure out how to put the pieces together!

I provide a program in the bin directory called new_py that will help you stub out new Python programs using the fabulous argparse module to parse the command line arguments and options for your programs. I highly recommend you start every new program with this. For example, if the README.md says "Write a Python program called abc.py that ...", then you should do this:

$ new_py abc

This will create a new file called abc.py (that has been made executable with chmod +x, if your operating system supports that) that has example code for you to start writing your program. It's best to put new_py into your $PATH or alter your $PATH to include the directory where it's located. FWIW, I always create a $HOME/.local/bin that I add to my $PATH for programs like this.

First use the GitHub interface to "fork" this repository into your own account. Then do git clone of your repository to get a local copy. Inside that checkout, do:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/kyclark/playful_python.git 

so that you can do git pull upstream master to get updates. When you create new files, git add/commit/push them to your repository. (Please do not create pull requests on my repository -- unless, of course, you have suggestions for improving my repo!).

This is a work in progress. If you see a directory contains a README.md, solution.py, Makefile, and test.py, then it's likely ready to be solved.

Right now, I'm not sure how I'll structure the exercises. I wouldn't mind if you just randomly chose one and see how it goes. They vary quite a bit in difficulty, so maybe I'll just give them 1, 2, or 3 stars to indicate easy to hard. Here I'll give a brief overview of the exercises:

• abuse (**): generate insults
• anagram (***): find anagrams of text
• apples_and_bananas (*): substitute vowels in text
• bacronym (**): back-fit words onto acronyms
• blackjack (**): play Blackjack (card game)
• bottles_of_beer (*): produce the "Bottle of Beer on the Wall" song
• gashlycrumb (*): create a morbid lookup table from text
• gematria (**): calculate numeric values of words from characters
• guess (*): write a number-guessing game
• hangman (***): write a Hangman (word/letter-guessing game)
• howler (*): uppercase input text
• jump_the_five (*): numeric encryption
• kentucky_fryer (**): turn text into Southern American English
• mad_libs: TBD
• markov_words (**): Markov chain to generate words
• markov_chain (***): Markov chain to generate text
• morse (***): write a Morse encoder/decoder
• movie_reader (*): print characters of text with movie pauses
• palindromes (*): find palindromes in text
• picnic (*): write the picnic game
• piggie (**): encode text in Pig Latin
• ransom_note (*): transform input text into RaNSom cASe.
• rhymer (*): produce rhyming "words" from input text
• rock_paper_scissors (*): write Rock, Paper, Scissors game
• rot13 (***): ROT13-encode input text
• soundex-rhymer (**): use Soundex to find rhyming words from a word list
• substring (**): write a game to guess words sharing a common substring
• tictactoe (**): write a Tic-Tac-Toe game
• twelve_days_of_christmas (**): produce the "12 Days of Christmas" song
• war (**): play the War card game

In addition, there are:

• appendix: texts on thing like data structures, regular expressions, etc. that are used in different exercises
• bin: useful programs like new_py

Ken Youens-Clark kyclark@gmail.com