In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Python Timer Functions. By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit the timer functions in Python’s time module and the tradeoffs between them. You’ll also review how a timer grows from a plain class into a data class and then into a context manager t...

August was a month for reading release notes rather than writing new code. Python 3.15 stopped accepting changes to its application binary interface, and three older branches got security patches with real CVEs behind them. Four separate AI libraries shipped breaking releases in ten days, and the la...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Python Statistics Fundamentals: How to Describe Your Data. By working through these questions, you’ll revisit the numerical quantities that describe and summarize a dataset, including the measures of central tendency, variability, and correlation. You’...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Understanding the Python Traceback. By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit how to read a traceback from the bottom up, what each part of the output tells you, how to recognize common exceptions like AttributeError and TypeError, and how to log a ...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Build Your Own Face Recognition Tool With Python. By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit how face detection differs from face recognition, what a face encoding actually holds, how a voting scheme picks the most likely match, and how validation ca...

We ran GPT-6 Astra through Real Python’s vibe check for new AI models: five fixed prompts, one shot each. The first one is always the same line, “Write a Python turtle program that draws a python reading a book.” Here’s what GPT-6 Astra drew: That’s task one of five, exactly as its turtle script dre...

How do you plan for the performance of your Python applications? What does a performance budget entail, and where should you spend your resources? This week on the show, we speak with Den Odell about his new book "Fast by Default: Practical Performance Engineering." [ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Pyth...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Common Python Data Structures (Guide). By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit the abstract data types that ship with Python’s standard library and how they map onto Python’s naming scheme. You’ll cover dictionaries and their specialized variants,...

We ran Claude Fable 5.1 through Real Python’s vibe check for new AI models: five fixed prompts, one shot each. The first one is always the same line, “Write a Python turtle program that draws a python reading a book.” Here’s what Claude Fable 5.1 drew: That’s task one of five, exactly as its turtle ...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Python AI: How to Build a Neural Network & Make Predictions. By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit how a neural network takes an input vector, transforms it through layers, and adjusts its weights and bias to make better predictions. You’ll also...

Python 3.15 makes UTF-8 the default text encoding. A plain open("notes.txt") call now decodes the same way on every platform, including Windows. Earlier Python versions picked an encoding from your locale, so on Windows the same code that worked on Linux and macOS could produce garbage. By the end o...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Python 3.15 Preview: UTF-8 by Default. By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit where Python’s old default text encoding came from, which operations rely on that default, how to find code that leans on it, how to pass an explicit encoding in your o...

Python decorators allow you to modify or extend the behavior of functions and methods without changing their actual code. When you use a Python decorator, you wrap a function with another function, which takes the original function as an argument and returns its modified version. This technique prov...

Do you have a phone that you can unlock with your face? Have you ever wondered how that works? Have you ever wanted to build your own face recognizer? With Python, some data, and a few helper packages, you can create your very own. In this project, you’ll use face detection and face recognition to i...

Integrating local large language models (LLMs) into your Python projects with Ollama is a great way to improve privacy, reduce costs, and build offline-capable AI-powered apps. Ollama is an open-source platform that makes it straightforward to run modern LLMs locally on your machine. Once you’ve set...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Automating EDA With fg-data-profiling. By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit how to turn a pandas DataFrame into an interactive exploratory data analysis report, how to read the statistics, correlations, and alerts that the report contains, and ...

Python async programming lets a single-threaded program stay busy while it waits on slow work, such as a network request, a database query, or a file read. Instead of blocking the CPU until the result arrives, your code hands control back to an event loop, which runs other work in the meantime. You ...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Async Programming in Python: From Generators to asyncio. By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit the concepts of synchronous and asynchronous programs, why you might want to write an asynchronous program, and how to use Python async features. [ Im...

What are the key characteristics of complex systems, and what are practical patterns for tackling complex coding problems? Christopher Trudeau is back on the show this week with another batch of PyCoder's Weekly articles and projects. [ Improve Your Python With 🐍 Python Tricks 💌 – Get a short & swee...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Rock, Paper, Scissors With Python: A Command Line Game. By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit how to collect and normalize player input, replay rounds with a while loop, decide a winner with dictionary-based rules, and swap fragile hard-coded st...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Getting Started With Claude Code. By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit how Claude Code differs from Claude Chat, how to install and set it up, what belongs in a CLAUDE.md file, and how Git keeps you in control of the changes that Claude Code ma...

Python 3.15 ships with a brand-new profiling package defined in PEP 799. It finally retires the ancient profile module, gives cProfile a new home under profiling.tracing, and adds profiling.sampling, a statistical sampling profiler code-named Tachyon. You can point it at a script, a module, or even ...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Python 3.15 Preview: Sampling Profiler. By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit how a sampling profiler differs from a tracing one, how to split wall-clock time from CPU time, how to spot which thread is hogging the GIL, how to read flame graphs a...

If you’re like most Python users, including us, then you probably started your Python journey by learning about print(). It helped you write your very own Hello World one-liner. You can use it to display formatted messages onto the screen and perhaps find some bugs. But if you think that’s all there...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of The Python print() Function: Go Beyond the Basics. By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit how string literals and f-strings work, how the sep, end, and flush arguments shape your output, and how to send that output somewhere other than the screen...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Python 3.12 Preview: Static Typing Improvements. By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit how to declare type variables with the new syntax from PEP 695, how constrained and bounded type variables differ, and how to define type aliases with the typ...

An AGENTS.md file gives your AI coding agent the context it needs to write code that fits your project’s guidelines. It’s a plain Markdown file at your project root where you can pin your Python version, dependency manager, coding conventions, and constraints. In this tutorial, you’ll build one of t...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of How to Write an AGENTS.md File for a Python Project. By working through this quiz, you’ll revisit the blocks that make up an AGENTS.md file: your project domain, setup and management, coding conventions, project structure, quality gates, constraints, a...

Why do AI systems silently fail? How can you set up a system that produces results while also reviewing and validating the work? This week on the show, Calvin Hendryx-Parker returns to discuss his recent talk "Orchestrate Agentic AI: Context, Checklists, and No-Miss Reviews." [ Improve Your Python W...

In this quiz, you’ll test your understanding of Introduction to Git and GitHub for Python Developers. Git is one of the most popular version control systems today, and finding your way around it means you can always get back to the version of your project that worked. By working through this quiz, y...