Miki Tebeka - Python Brain Teasers: Exercise Your Mind

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To the Python community, Im proud to call myself a member.

Preface

The Python programming language is a simple one, but like all otherlanguages it has its quirks. This book uses these quirks as a teachingopportunity. By understanding the gaps in your knowledge, youll becomebetter at what you do.

Theres a lot of research showing that people who make mistakes duringthe learning process learn better than people who dont. If you use thisapproach when fixing bugs, youll find you enjoy bug hunting more andbecome a better developer after each bug you fix.

These teasers will help you avoid mistakes. Some of the teasers are frommy own experience shipping bugs to production, and some are from othersdoing the same.

Teasers are fun! We geeks love to solve puzzles. You can also use theseteasers to impress your coworkers, have knowledge competitions, andbecome better together.

Many of these brain teasers are from quizzes I gave at conferences andmeetups. Ive found that people highly enjoy them and they tend toliven the room.

At the beginning of each chapter, Ill show you a short Python programand will ask you to guess the output. The following are the possible answers:

• Syntax error
• Exception
• Hang
• Some output (e.g., [1 2 3] )

Python Version
	Im using Python version 3.8.2 to run the code. The output might change in future versions.

Before moving on to the answer and the explanation, go ahead and guessthe output. After guessing the output, I encourage you to run the codeand see the output yourself; only then proceed to read the solution andthe explanation. Ive been teaching programming for many years andfound this course of action to be highly effective.