Show HN: Practical Python Projects book release

Hi everyone!

I just released the Practical Python Projects book! (https://practicalpython.yasoob.me) You can get a free sample chapter here: https://practicalpython.yasoob.me/sample/chapter2.pdf.

I am happy to announce the first version as a release candidate. I have poured a lot of love into writing this book and would love to hear what you guys think. (A limited 100% off and discount coupons at the end)

This is not a pure beginner book. The book does assume some background Python knowledge. You need to know the basics like methods, functions, classes, and such. If I use something that is not typically covered in beginner Python books, I will explain it before I use it. There are no tests for these projects as they are really small and teach you how to glue different pieces together.

Some projects that we will be making

- A Twilio bot that keeps you updated with the latest match scores from the FIFA World Cup

- A Facebook Messenger bot the shares latest memes, jokes, and shower-thoughts scraped from Reddit

- An automated invoice generator and deploying it using Flask

- Making automated cinema-preshow by downloading and stitching together related movie trailers using moviepy

- Generating automated article summaries and overlaying them on top of images

- Understanding and decoding JPEG images using vanilla Python

- Creating a GUI application using PyQt for downloading online videos

- Implementing a TUI email client that allows reading emails in the terminal

The first 50 people can use the "hn-love" coupon (without the quotation marks) to get 15% off. I am also offering a 30-day no-questions-asked refund policy if you don't enjoy this book and don't learn anything new.

You can buy the book and see a detailed FAQ at https://practicalpython.yasoob.me. If you want to try before you buy, see the sample chapter at https://practicalpython.yasoob.me/sample/chapter2.pdf, or you can learn more my writing style by reading any of my recent articles over at https://yasoob.me.

This is exactly the kind of book I was looking for. I learn best by building projects. It’s not the syntax that is hard, it’s learning how experienced python devs do things (coming from other languages). Look forward to diving in. Thank you for your time writing it.

Same here! Syntax is often the easy part and building an end-to-end product is usually a challenge. I wrote this book for precisely this reason. I hope this book helps you :)

I work at a school that uses Python extensively. I've purchased the book (haven't yet got the links). Is there a group discount? Our ICT teachers might be interested in this.

Hi Chris,

We can definitely work something out! You should have gotten the books by now. Take a look at the book and if you would like to get a group discount I can definitely arrange that. Would love to have more kids get their hands on this. :)

On the book site Intermediate Python book is linked to codecademy. https://book.pythontips.com/en/latest/ is the right one I guess.

Thanks for the heads-up! Just fixed it.

I'm glad to see that you use PyQt for the GUI. Have you examined PySide as well? It's mostly drop-in compatible with PyQt and has a much better license in my opinion.

I have! I don’t use PyQt professionally so never had to worry about the license too much. Also for the most part, PySide should work just fine with the projects in the book :)

I remember trying both last year, and found that for a trivial GUI, PySide had a 100ms slower startup time than PyQt. PySide was 300+ms, PyQt was 200+ms.

Thank you for that insight. Other than the startup time, were there any other performance problems with PySide? Honestly, I think that a 100ms slower startup time is a good tradeoff!

That's all I found. GUI isn't very easy to benchmark, to be honest.

100ms isn't much, indeed. A more complicated GUI program will likely render that trivial.

Just purchased. Waiting for the link. Looks very interesting. I’ve always loved recipe books like these.

I like paper books. Can I buy a paper copy? Your purchase flow is unclear.