Updates and Errata - Second printing
This page is broken into two parts, Updates and Errata. Updates address issues that affect whether your code will run or not. Errata refer to minor issues such as typos, and errors in grayed-out code that probably won’t affect the code you’re entering.
If you find an error in the book or can’t get something to work, please let me know. You can reach me through email at ehmatthes@gmail.com, or on Twitter at @ehmatthes.
Updates
Chapter 12
This only applies if you’re using Python 3.8.
The stable version of Pygame has not been updated to work with Python 3.8 yet. However, there is a recent development version that works with Python 3.8. To install it, run the following command:
$ python -m pip install pygame==2.0.0.dev6
You should use the same command you use to run a Python terminal session on your system, which might be python, python3, py, python3.8, or something else.
If you’ve had any issues running Pygame on macOS, this version of Pygame should address those issues as well.
Chapter 17
Running hn_submissions.py sometimes results in a KeyError (page 373)
The program hn_submissions.py makes a series of API calls to get information about each of the articles on the front page of Hacker News. When processing the data associated with each article, the code looks for the 'descendants' key, which tells us how many comments the article has associated with it. Hacker News is maintained partially as a promotional tool for the startup accelerator YCombinator, and YC companies can make special posts on Hacker News that are exempt from comments. For example, YC companies can make hiring posts that sit on the front page of HN for a while, with comments disabled.
If you run hn_submissions.py when one of these posts is on the front page, you’ll get a KeyError because there is no 'descendants' key for these posts. This doesn’t happen all that often, but if you run into this issue you can catch the KeyError and continue the loop when one of these posts is present:
-- snip --
for submission_id in submission_ids[:30]:
-- snip --
# Build a dictionary for each article.
try:
submission_dict = {
'title': response_dict['title'],
'hn_link': f"http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id={submission_id}",
'comments': response_dict['descendants'],
}
except KeyError:
# This is a special YC post with comments disabled.
continue
else:
submission_dicts.append(submission_dict)
-- snip --
Chapter 20
See Deploying Django Projects.
Errata
Chapter 6
On page 100, the order of the output for user.py should match the order in which keys were inserted into the dictionary.
Chapter 7
On page 125, pop() is referred to as a function. This function can only be called through an object, so it is more properly called a method.
Chapter 13
On page 262 in the code snippet that calculates the value for number_rows, available_height_y should be available_space_y. The listing on page 263 that uses this code is correct.
Chapter 15
On page 323, in exercise 15-3, plt.scatter() should be ax.scatter() and plt.plot() should be ax.plot().
Chapter 19
On page 414, the line that sets the value for labels should have empty quotes:
class EntryForm(forms.ModelForm):
class Meta:
model = Entry
fields = ['text']
labels = {'text': ''}
widgets = {'text': forms.Textarea(attrs={'cols': 80})}
The code works fine as it’s written, but the new entry page will differ slightly from the screenshot shown on page 417.
Index
On page 497, the entry for Discord should point to page 484, not page 48.