13. PRACTICE PROJECTS¶
So far, this book has taught you techniques for writing readable, Pythonic code. Let’s put these techniques into practice by looking at the source code for two command line games: the Tower of Hanoi and Four-in-a-Row.
These projects are short and text-based to keep their scope small, but they demonstrate the principles this book outlines so far. I formatted the code using the Black tool described in “Black: The Uncompromising Code Formatter” on page 53. I chose the variable names according to the guidelines in Chapter 4. I wrote the code in a Pythonic style, as described in Chapter 6. In addition, I wrote comments and docstrings as described in Chapter 11. Because the programs are small and we haven’t yet covered object-oriented programming (OOP), I wrote these two projects without the classes you’ll learn more about in Chapters 15 to 17.
This chapter presents the full source code for these two projects along with a detailed breakdown of the code. These explanations aren’t so much for how the code works (a basic understanding of Python syntax is all that’s needed for that), but why the code was written the way it was. Still, differentsoftware developers have different opinions on how to write code and what they deem as Pythonic. You’re certainly welcome to question and critique the source code in these projects.
After reading through a project in this book, I recommend typing the code yourself and running the programs a few times to understand how they work. Then try to reimplement the programs from scratch. Your code doesn’t have to match the code in this chapter, but rewriting the code will give you a sense of the decision making and design trade-offs that program- ming requires.