References

Foundations of Python Programming

Runestone Academy FOPP is a practical free online book with many projects and related ‘hands on’ theory, definitely recommended!

Note on graphics: to make activities more interesting, the book often asks to visualize data with the following libraries:

• turtle is a Python module which was designed really only for didactical purposes. While fun, you will most probably want to try doing the same exercises using a more ‘serious’ library like matplotlib

• cimage: this is a simple image manipulation library, made mostly for didactical purposes: you might want to try numpy and matplotlib instead

• altair is a ‘pro’ library for cool interactive visualizations: we don’t treat altair in this book, you can try it or stick with the good old matplotlib

W3Resources website

Contains many simple exercises on Python basics, do them!

• Basic1, Basic2, String, List, Dictionary, Tuple, Sets, Condition Statements and Loops, Functions,Lambda, CSV Read Write

Software Carpentry

Software Carpentry is a website full of free educational resources, there is definitely a lot of good stuff to discover. We highlight these exercises (in tutorial format):

• Programming with Python: Nice tutorial with many exercises about processing a csv with topics: python basics, numpy, csv

• Plotting and programming with Python More advanced, uses pandas

You may find other stuff in Community Developed Lessons for Jupyter and Python

Edabit

Contains many python exercises with solutions. Here we put a small selection, for others you may look at ‘Very hard’ level, they are not so hard after all.

Edabit - Basics

• Calculated Bonus

Edabit - Strings

• First Before Second Letter

• Wrap Around

• C*ns*r*d Str*ngs

• Valid Rondo Form

• Parenthesis Clusters

• Count Missing Numbers

• Math Making

• To Adjust the Time

Edabit - Lists

• Combined Consecutive Sequence

• Prison break

• Water Balloon

• Fulcrum

• Beginning and End Pairs

• Sort by the Letters

• Anonymous Name

• Almost Palindrome

• Number of Two or More Consecutive Ones

• Rearrange the Number

Edabit - Dictionaries

• How Many Unique Styles?

• People Sort

• Encoded String Parse

• Generating Words from Names

Edabit - Matrices

• Tallest Skyscraper

• Majority vote

• Make a Box

• Advanced List Sort

• Layers in a Rug, a bit convoluted, but interesting

• Leaderbord Sort

• Concert seats

• Word Nests - Part 2

• Tic Tac Toe

• Cleaning Project Files

LeetCode

Website with collections of exercises sorted by difficulty and acceptance rate, quite performance-oriented. You can generally try sorting by Acceptance and Easy filters.

• leetcode.com

We put here a selection.

LeetCode - Strings

Check string problems sorted by Acceptance and Easy. In particular:

• Shuffle Strings

• Increasing Decreasing String

• Detect Capital

• Unique email addresses

• Robot return to origin

• String matching in an Array

• Reverse Words in a String III

• Unique Morse codes

• Goat Latin

• Count Binary Substrings

LeetCode - Lists

Check array problems sorted by Acceptance and Easy. In particular:

• Average Salary Excluding the Minimum and Maximum Salary

• Contains Duplicate

• Majority Element

• Maximum Gap

• Can Make Arithmetic Progression From Sequence

• Max consecutive ones

• Missing number - has many possible solutions

• Move Zeros

• K Closest Points to Origin (use lambda functions)

• Rotated Digits

• Filter Restaurants by Vegan-Friendly, Price and Distance (to sort use lambda functions)

• Largest Perimeter Triangle hint: you don’t actually need to try many combinations …

• H-Index

• Sort array by parity 1

• Sort array by parity 2

• Relative sort array

• Insert Intervals (use lambda functions)

• Merge Intervals (use lambda functions)

• Sort colors

• Find all numbers disappeared in an array

• Degree of an array

• The k Strongest Values in an Array a bit convoluted but doable

• Array partition 1 actually a bit hard but makes you think

• Distant Barcodes

• Reorganize String think first when the task is not possible, for the rest is like previous one

LeetCode - Sets and Dictionaries

Check dictionary problems sorted by Acceptance and Easy.

Note: Keep in mind these problems are in section dictionaries for good reason: in order to execute fast they often require you to preprocess the data by indexing in it in some way, like i.e. putting strings in a set or as keys in a dicitonary so you can later look them up very fast.

WARNING: if you feel the need to use nested cycles, or search methods on lists/strings like .index, .find, in operator, .count, .replace on strings, try thinking first whether it is really necessary or you might use the above mentioned preprocessing instead.

Check in particular:

• Replace words

• Word break

• Fair candy swap

• Verifying an alien dictionary Note: you can use lambda functions, but it is not strictly necessary

• Least Number of Unique Integers after K Removals

• People Whose List of Favorite Companies Is Not a Subset of Another List

LeetCode - Matrices

• Matrix Diagonal Sum

• Cells with odd values in a matrix

• Count negative numbers in Sorted matrix

• Lucky Numbers in a Matrix

• The k-weakest rows in a Matrix (use lambda functions

• Matrix Cells in Distance Order

• Toepliz Matrix

• Special Positions in a Binary Matrix

• Reshape the Matrix

• Kth Smallest Element in a Sorted Matrix - there are many possible optimizations, you can make a first version using sort on everything, and then think about improving the algorithm

• Set Matrix Zeroes interesting, try avoiding duplicating the matrix

• Search a 2D Matrix

• Search a 2D Matrix ii

• Spiral Matrix

• Spiral Matrix ii

• Matrix Block Sum

• Sort the Matrix Diagonally not fun, but doable

Leet code - Graphs

Note: here on softpython we do not put links to exercises about visiting graphs, so for these you do not need stuff like breadth first search, depth first search, etc.

• Find the Town Judge

• Maximal Network Rank

HackerRank

Contains many Python 3 exercises on algorithms and data structures (Needs to login)

• hackerrank.com

Geeks for Geeks

Contains many exercises - doesn’t have solutions nor explicit asserts but if you login and submit solutions, the system will run some tests serverside and give you a response.

In general for Part A you can filter difficulty by school+basic+easy and if you need to do part B also include medium.

• Example: Filter difficulty by school+basic+easy and topic String

You can select many more topics if you click more>> un der Topic Tags:

Dive into Python 3

More practical, contains more focused tutorials (i.e. manage XML files)

• online version

• printed

• zip offline

• PDF

Licence: Creative Commons By Share-alike 3.0 as reported at the bottom of book website

Introduction to Scientific Programming with Python

Focuses on numerical calculations, you can check first 7 chapters until dictionaries.

By Joakim Sundnes.

• PDF for Python (only theory)

• Exercises – a LOT of stuff, although some exercises are too much into engineering / maths compared to this book

• EXTRA: if you like, it also contains chapters on classes which are certainly useful.