I have written very many games using Python and Pygame. Very nice language (I like the syntax much better than the C-like languages) and tools.
If you're going to do this, there is one very important tip: use psyco. It ( http://psyco.sourceforge.net/ ) magically speeds up all Python execution by about 3-4x. In one of my games ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/slasha/ , still in its early stages) the millisecond per frame count went from 25-300 to 15-80 (drawing the desktop seems to take an unavoidable 7-10 ms).
As for what you learn doing this kind of thing, you use trigonometry a lot, you use the pythagorean theorem a lot, my game here is the way I thought up of the pathfinding algorithm.
That's a great way to get kids in to programming, games are very low 'barrier to entry' and as they get more sophisticated will cause the wanna be programmer to pick up a whole pile of knowledge about other fields (such as physics) as well.
Highly recommended, and at that price you really can't go wrong :)
Might be easier to use Javascript for this purpose since it is available practically everywhere. And HTML Canvas support makes writing graphics/games very easy.
Seems to be a very good book. I would love to help translate it into Portuguese so kids around me could make use of it.
If there's still time, I would suggest not using the box image for variables. I prefer label tags because the box analogy assumes certain objects fit in certain boxes and is, thus, typed (unlike Python, where objects have types and names are just names). Also, an object can be contained in a single box while any number of labels can be attached to any object.
I agree. Labels better capture how Python works, because the assignmest statement causes another variable to point to the same object instead of copying the object, e.g.:
>>> a = [1,2]
>>> b = a
>>> a[0]='h'
>>> b
['h', 2]
I was going to recommend this book to my younger brother. However, I changed my mind shortly after discovering that this book does not cover classes! I might not be an expert, but almost every Python program I've read uses classes, and I think it would be difficult for a beginner to read the code of others after finishing this book.
One problem with this book is it doesn't teach good programming style. For example, the program in chapter 19 is 200 lines of code that doesn't use procedures anywhere -- it's all in one big lump of code.
This is bad, because when novice programmers try to modify the program, they will quickly find it becomes unmaintainable.
It's not nearly as comprehensive as Invent with Python, but it also attempts to deal with the challenge of giving a low 'barrier to entry' to learning Python.
If you're going to do this, there is one very important tip: use psyco. It ( http://psyco.sourceforge.net/ ) magically speeds up all Python execution by about 3-4x. In one of my games ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/slasha/ , still in its early stages) the millisecond per frame count went from 25-300 to 15-80 (drawing the desktop seems to take an unavoidable 7-10 ms).
As for what you learn doing this kind of thing, you use trigonometry a lot, you use the pythagorean theorem a lot, my game here is the way I thought up of the pathfinding algorithm.