Environment Problems

I was excited to start reading a new book today. It is Tiny Python Projects. From the get go, the author wants to have you executing PyTest unit tests. Sounded legit to me. However I encountered a problem with the very first test. It complained that python3 was not a valid command.

Well I am on Windows 7. My python install has a program called python. There is no python3. Easy enough. I created a python3 program that was a copy of the python one. Got past the first 2 tests. Then it bombs on the third test.

The error message is not clear. The book says you will get an error message. But the book error is not the same as my error. It seems that the test is trying to issue some Linux style commands. But hello. That does not work on Windows.

To be fair, the book recommends you install the "Windows Subsystem for Linux". Again, this is not going to work for my computer. WSL requires at least Windows 10. I am stuck on Windows 7. I get the feeling this book is specifically written for somebody coding on a Linux platform.

I am not sure whether I should be angry with this book. I really want to give it a chance. But man. It is tough putting up with these problems. Currently I don't know any specifics about PyTest. So maybe I can ramp up on it. Then I could roll my own unit tests using PyTest and skip the ones from the book.

The remaining question is if I am doing all this work, how much value is this book providing? Not as much as I had hoped. I will keep you posted on my progress.

Popular posts from this blog

HTML Web Page Builder

Image
I am attending college part time right now. The college gave me access to an O'Reilly digital library. It has books published by O'Reilly. But it also has a lot of other books too. It feels like an Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscription for technical books. So far, I have checked out quite a few of the books, especially those related to Python. I have stored a picture of all the covers of the good books on my local hard drive. Each book has a directory with the book name as the directory name. I have standardized on calling the book cover image "cover.jpg". Now I would like to browse all these books of interest. There are over 100 of them. So I wrote a small Python program to go through the root directory, find all the book names, and create a web page with all the covers. I standardized the size of the covers, and made them small so I could see more per page. Voila.
Read more

Memories of Logo

Image
The turtle module in python reminds me of the old Logo programming language. I recall it as a teaching language from the 1980s. It was marketed as a simple language that kids could use to learn how to do rudimentary programming. You would give the turtle directions, and it would draw pictures on the screen for you. I am reading a book where they encourage you to write your own functions to create shapes using turtle. For example, while you could write the turtle calls out to draw a rectangle, it would be easier just to call your own rectangle() function. Sounds good to me. Right now I am doing some block style drawing. But pretty soon I am going to make some patterns like Spirograph, another item from the 1980s.
Read more

Mission Accepted

Image
I started a new programming book today called Mission Python. The whole book is teaching you how to create a graphic adventure game. I already downloaded the finished product. While I was unimpressed by the game since I kept getting killed, I think this was because I did not understand the controls well enough. Decided to give this book a go. I was pleased that by the end of chapter 1, we have draw the planet Mars, a spaceship, and an astronaut. The astronaut can move and is controlled by the arrow keys. And when the astronaut move past the spaceship, it "goes behind" the spaceship. Pretty good for chapter 1. The only drawback is that this game requires Pygame Zero. I wish we could have done the whole thing with only Pygame. But maybe the extra module makes things a bit easier.
Read more