The 21 fun-but-powerful activities in Tiny Python Projects teach Python fundamentals through puzzles and games. Youll be engaged and entertained with every exercise, as you learn about text manipulation, basic algorithms, and lists and dictionaries, and other foundational programming skills. Gain confidence and experience while you create each satisfying project.

Instead of going quickly through a wide range of concepts, this book concentrates on the most useful skills, like text manipulation, data structures, collections, and program logic with projects that include a password creator, a word rhymer, and a Shakespearean insult generator. Author Ken Youens-Clark also teaches you good programming practice, including writing tests for your code as you go.

Write command-line Python programs
Manipulate Python data structures
Use and control randomness
Write and run tests for programs and functions
Download testing suites for each project

For readers familiar with the basics of Python programming.

Ken Youens-Clark is a Senior Scientific Programmer at the University of Arizona. He has an MS in Biosystems Engineering and has been programming for over 20 years.


1 How to write and test a Python program
2 The crows nest: Working with strings
3 Going on a picnic: Working with lists
4 Jump the Five: Working with dictionaries
5 Howler: Working with files and STDOUT
6 Words count: Reading files and STDIN, iterating lists, formatting strings
7 Gashlycrumb: Looking items up in a dictionary
8 Apples and Bananas: Find and replace
9 Dial-a-Curse: Generating random insults from lists of words
10 Telephone: Randomly mutating strings
11 Bottles of Beer Song: Writing and testing functions
12 Ransom: Randomly capitalizing text
13 Twelve Days of Christmas: Algorithm design
14 Rhymer: Using regular expressions to create rhyming words
15 The Kentucky Friar: More regular expressions
16 The Scrambler: Randomly reordering the middles of words
17 Mad Libs: Using regular expressions
18 Gematria: Numeric encoding of text using ASCII values
19 Workout of the Day: Parsing CSV files, creating text table output
20 Password strength: Generating a secure and memorable password
21 Tic-Tac-Toe: Exploring state
22 Tic-Tac-Toe redux: An interactive version with type hints