Dean B writes:
I'm on page 137 of your book Python For Kids (chapter 10). I noticed a sentence at the top of the page, and have a question on it. It says "This won't work if you're using the modified version of IDLE that we set up in Chapter 1." I didn't remember seeing anything in chapter 1 on a modified version of IDLE. I looked back through chapter 1, but still don't see anything on the matter.
Would you please tell me what page that is on? I'm more curious than anything. I was frustrated with the "New File" window so I did a search and found IDLEX extensions and installed that. It works quite well for me. I would like to know though how your modified version works.
I'm new to programming and after searching for a good programming language to start with I chose Python, and after looking through a lot of books I chose your book "Python For Kids". I’m a senior citizen and have found this book to be a great introduction to Python. Certainly not just for kids as long as the adults are okay with the kid like context. Works for me, and thanks for such a good book.
Apologies for the confusion there -- this was a miss when we updated the book for later versions of Python 3. When Python for Kids was released in 2013 (end of 2012), you needed to make a minor modification to the shortcut used for starting up IDLE, to turn off "subprocess mode". Without going into too much detail about what that is, effectively if you ran IDLE with subprocess mode on, some of the graphical examples (tkinter, etc) would cause the Shell to hang. This was fixed in a later version of the IDLE runtime, and I removed those instructions from the first chapter on installation -- but completely missed the reference on page 137. Thanks very much for letting me know and I've updated the errata here.