Journal | Jason R Briggs

Spacing causing confusion

Martin writes:

My son is working through your book. He spotted a very minor error and I thought we would report it: In Chapter 8 on Page 102, the code for the three classes is missing an extra newline between the Animal and Mammal class. This can create some confusion when typing in the code...

Python for Kids in Bulgarian

I somehow forgot to post this last year, but the Bulgarian translation of Python for Kids (2nd Edition, no less) was published in October 2024. Available from Via Lettera.

Python for Kids 2 and LaTeX

For those who are interested, Python for Kids 2 has been completely rewritten as LaTeX (using No Starch's style); partially in text files, and partially in Overleaf:

Overleaf was great, particularly for the review process, but I have to say working in LaTeX is an order of magnitude bette...

Announcing: Python for Kids 2nd Edition

The 2nd edition of Python for Kids is coming October 2022. What's new? Not an exhaustive list, but it has been completely refreshed for the latest version of Python, as well as being updated for the latest versions of Windows and Ubuntu. New Raspberry Pi instructions are there for those who want t...

BBC micro:bit with Python for Kids

Janick writes:

My son got "Python for Kids" (the dutch translation) from Sinterklaas last december (Sinterklaas is the local Santa in Belgium and the Netherlands). He really enjoyed it! The weeks following he read and coded almost every day until he finished the book. Some days after, I ment...

Em Học Python

The Vietnamese translation of Python for Kids is now available from the publisher Sputnik Edu. I think that's something in the region of 12 languages in total now (including English)! 👍

Breaking out of loops

Sherry W writes (excerpted):

Excellent book so far for my grandson.

On page 78 should it read?:

while True:
    lots of code here
    lots of code here
    lots of code here
    if some value == False
        break

Book is written very well for that age group. It’s great to h...

Tkinter colorchooser problems (revisited)

Suranga writes:

My son and I have been learning Python with your great book. Unfortunately, we hit an issue with Colorchooser - the problem appears identical to this one: https://jasonrbriggs.com/journal/2013/05/01/tkinter-colorchooser-problems.html In the solution, you suggest we revisit Ch...

Problem with bouncing ball

Lennier M writes:

I am on page 202 of your book, but when I followed your instructions, the ball stopped moving, instead of moving in multiple directions. Here is my code:

class Ball:
    def __init__(self, canvas, color):
        self.canvas = canvas
        self.id = canvas.create_oval(...

Long and short dashes

Jan vK writes:

here’s an example from your book that gives an error: count_down_by_twos = list(range(40, 10, −2)) SyntaxError: invalid character in identifier please inform me how to solve this problem

It looks like you might have copied-and-pasted the code? Perhaps from the digital version...

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