Python Puzzles

Short snippets of Python code with some tricky questions! Knowledge of the dis module might be very helpful.

Getting Started

Problems are split into:

• fundamental - great place to start if you haven't got much experience of working with Python and are still building a mental map how it works. They shouldn't be too taxing but will address important aspects of the language.

• working - they assume a reasonable familiarity with Python and are actually something you might encounter in your everyday code.

• esoteric - you might have a lifetime experience of Python coding and still scratch your head! While fun they do constitute corner cases rarely encountered.

Prerequisites

You will need a jupyter notebook installed and a Python 3. If you don't know what you are doing follow the steps below:

• Open your terminal or command line or windows and type pip --version hopefully it should tell you a current version of pip followed by the path to your default Python installation and its version (If it is 3.x you are good to go)

• pip install virtualenv this will install virtualenv a tool to create isolated Python environments.

• virtualenv notebook will create a new folder notebook which contains Python executable and a copy of pip library.

• activate the new virtualenv on Unix type source notebook\activate on Windows notebook\scripts\activate.bat

• pip install jupyter this will install jupyter notebook and all of its dependencies in your new virtualenv.

• change directory to folder with this code samples and run jupyter notebook