The final project was due today, the end of the 16th weekly module for this course. Nonetheless, the last day of the semester is Saturday, May 25th at 10 PM. Whatever assignments you have turned in by then will be counted in full towards your final grade. I am available to help you all week. Use this link to put a 30-minute meeting on my calendar here: https://calendly.com/hobs

The sooner you turn things in, the sooner you can get feedback and potentially increase your grade by improving on your assignments. It usually takes me about 2 days to grade a programming project and get feedback to you, so plan ahead.

Here are some tips that helped the students who have turned in final projects and earned an A:

• You will lose points if you do not comply with the PEP8 style guide: https://peps.python.org/pep-0008 . PEP8 is a requirement in most workplaces where developers collaborate on software development. And it is mentioned in the instructions for both project assignments.
• You can install and use a linter plugin within your IDE (Spyder, Sublime Text, IDLE, PyCharm, VSCodium) to detect and highlight your syntax errors as well as PEP8 style mistakes. The following python packages can be pip installed and used on the command line: pylint, flake8, pyflakes.
• Autolinters such as black (pip install black) will clean up your code for you with the command black . The dot at the end of the command means to clean up all files in the current directory.
• Use string processing methods such as .strip(), .split(), .lower(), .replace(), .startswith(), .endswith(), in, slices ([:2]) and indexing ([0]) to make your conditional expressions on input text more “forgiving” of user typos and abbreviations.
• Use the help() function built into the interpreter to learn about any function or data type or class in the Python console. For example, try help(str) to see all the methods and attributes of str objects.
• Use the [TAB] key after typing as much as you can remember of an object’s name to see a list of possible completions. For example, type str.s and then hit the [TAB] key to see possible completions like str.split, str.strip, str.swapcase and str.startswith. This will work on any variable, whether it contains an object or a function. Everything in Python is an object.
• Use the ?? operator at the end of an object to display its source code and learn “best practices” for writing clean Python code. This works best for imported objects and modules. For example: import random and then random??.