Ten Essays on Fizz Buzz
Ten Essays on Fizz Buzz
Meditations on Python, mathematics, science, engineering, and design
About the Book
"This book is so good. I wish I'd written it." -- Tim Hopper (@tdhopper)
"Highly recommended: a grand tour of computer science theory and practical software engineering, explored through the lens of 10 Fizz Buzz solutions in Python. Outstanding." -- Paco Nathan (@pacoid)
"I'd never have thought a book about Fizz Buzz would make me a better programmer, but I was wrong. Joel in the course of 10 chapters does a broad survey of core Python concepts, software design and testing, mathematics, and more (including deep learning) using Fizz Buzz as the guiding example. It's that rare technical book that remains engaging, entertaining, and accessible." -- Binal Patel (@binalkp91)
More real Python tips than any "Python tricks" book! From a Python beginner to an experienced ML practitioner, you're bound to learn something about the language and its application to a progressive level of algorithmic applications. Recommended for the anyone looking to "level up" their Python or problem solving skills! -- Tom Marthaler (@tmarthal)
Fizz Buzz is the following (simple) problem:
Print the numbers from 1 to 100, except that if the number is divisible by 3, instead print "fizz"; if the number is divisible by 5, instead print "buzz"; and if the number is divisible by 15, instead print "fizzbuzz".
It originated as a children's game, but has since taken on a new life as a lowest-common-denominator litmus test for assessing computer programmers.
If you are an experienced programmer, it is an extremely easy problem to solve. Because of this, it has taken on a third life as the prototypical bad interview problem. Everyone knows that it's the question you ask people to make sure that they're not completely incompetent as programmers. Accordingly, if your interviewer asks you to solve it, he's suggesting he thinks it possible that you're completely incompetent as a programmer. You would not be wrong to feel insulted!
My association with this problem began in 2016, when I wrote a blog post called Fizz Buzz in Tensorflow, the (possibly fictional) story of one such insulted programmer who decided to show up his interviewer by approaching Fizz Buzz as a deep learning problem. This post went modestly viral, and ever since then I have been seen as a thought leader in the Fizz Buzz space.
Accordingly, over the years I have come up with and/or collected various other stupid and/or clever ways of solving Fizz Buzz. I have not blogged about them, as I am not the sort of person who beats a joke to death, but occasionally I will tweet about them, and recently in response someone suggested that I write a book on "100 Ways of Writing Fizz Buzz in Python."
Now, I could probably come up with 100 ways of solving Fizz Buzz, but most of them would not be very interesting. Luckily for you, I was able to come up with 10 that are interesting in various ways, each of which turned out to be a good launching-off point for (sometimes meandering) discussions of various aspects of coding, Python, Fizz Buzz, mathematics, software design, technical interviewing, and various other topics.
Hence "Ten Essays on Fizz Buzz".
In many ways this is a strange book. Its goal is not to teach you a specific field or a specific technology. I hope you will learn a lot from reading it, but it's not really a book that you'd read in order to learn anything in particular. Most technical books are about specific technical topics; this one sort of isn't.
Nonetheless, it is a technical book. Each essay contains code that implements a different solution of Fizz Buzz. Each essay uses code to illustrate its ideas. Each essay represents my current best thinking about how to solve problems using code. If you have a coding job, you should feel no reluctance to expense this book to your employer.
As I primarily code in Python, all of these solutions will be in Python. Some of them will use features that were only introduced in Python 3.6, and some of them will demonstrate concepts and techniques that are mostly specific to Python. On some level this is deeply a Python book. However, my goal was to write a book that would be interesting and enlightening even if you are not a Python programmer. I'll leave it to you to judge how successful I was.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
-
1. 100 Print Statements
- Algorithm and Abstraction
- Reusability and Changeability
- Testability and Fizz Buzz
- Testability Beyond Fizz Buzz
-
Generating the
print
Statements
-
2. if / elif / elif / else
- Mind the Order
- Divisibility and Modulus
- “We’re Adders, We Need Logs to Multiply”
- Some Other Checks
- Some Well-Known Tricks
-
Eliminating
elif
-
3. The Cycle of 15
- Equivalence Classes
-
None
as a Sentinel - Truthiness and Logic
-
dict.get
-
4. Euclid’s Solution
- Prime Numbers
- Performance Optimization
- Factorization
- What Prime Factorization Has to Do with Fizz Buzz
- Greatest Common Divisors and Least Common Multiples
- gcd and Fizz Buzz
- Euclid’s Algorithm
-
5. Trigonometry
- Sin and Cos
-
int
- Pi and Tau
- Operator Overload
-
6. A Big Number
- Decimal, Binary, and Hexadecimal
- A Secret Encoding
- Prefix Codes
- Huffman Coding
- Data Modeling
- Our Data Model
- Constructing the Code
- Digression: Mutable Default Values
-
Digression:
heapq
- Decoding
- “Accidentally Quadratic”
- Regular Expressions
-
7. Infinite Iterables
- Iterables, Iterators, and Lazy Infinite Sequences
-
itertools
-
zip
vsmap
- Putting It All Together
- Bonus: PowerFizz
-
8. Random Guessing
-
random
- Pseudorandomness and the Seed
- Creating a Pseudorandom Generator
- Advances in the Same Iterator
- Values and References
- Argument Unpacking
- The Cycle of 15, Redux
- Where did 23_977_775 come from?
- Putting it all together
-
-
9. Matrix Multiplication
- n-Dimensional Arrays
- Digression: Recursion, Iteration, and Tail Recursion
- NumPy
- Working With Arrays
- Fizz Buzz as a Matrix Multiplication Problem
- How Did I Choose Those Weights?
-
10. Fizz Buzz in Tensorflow
- Machine Learning
- Fizz Buzz as a Machine Learning Problem
- Learning and Generalization
- Feature Engineering
- Deep Learning
- Validation
- How Does It Work?
- About the Author
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
The Leanpub 60-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms
Do Well. Do Good.
Authors have earned$11,577,045writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub, earning 80% royalties while saving up to 25 million pounds of CO2 and up to 46,000 trees.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers), EPUB (for phones and tablets) and MOBI (for Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
Top Books
Recipes for Decoupling
Matthias NobackSignalR on .NET 6 - the Complete Guide
Fiodar SazanavetsLearn everything there is to learn about SignalR and how to integrate it with the latest .NET 6 and C# 10 features. Learn how to connect any type of client to SignalR, including plain WebSocket client. Learn how to build interactive applications that can communicate with each other in real time without making excessive calls.
The BDD Books - Discovery (Japanese Edition)
Gáspár Nagy, Seb Rose, and Yuya Kazamaウクライナ難民を支援 - 2022年5月末まで延長!
この本の売り上げの50%は、 https://unicef.hu/veszhelyzet-ukrajnaban と https://int.depaulcharity.org/fundraising-for-depaul-ukraine/ に寄付されます。
本書籍は、振る舞い駆動開発(Behavior Driven Development, BDD)や受け入れテスト駆動開発(Acceptance Test-Driven Development, ATDD)の発見フェーズを最大限に活用する方法を提供します。
The easiest way to learn design patterns
Fiodar SazanavetsLearn design patterns in the easiest way possible. You will no longer have to brute-force your way through each one of them while trying to figure out how it works. The book provides a unique methodology that will make your understanding of design patterns stick. It can also be used as a reference book where you can find design patterns in seconds.
Agile Testing Condensed Japanese Edition
Yuya Kazama, Janet Gregory, and Lisa CrispinJanet GregoryとLisa Crispinによる2019年9月発行の書籍『Agile Testing Condensed』の日本語翻訳版です。アジャイルにおいてどのような考えでテストを行うべきなのか簡潔に書かれています!
OpenIntro Statistics
David Diez, Christopher Barr, Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, and OpenIntroA complete foundation for Statistics, also serving as a foundation for Data Science.
Leanpub revenue supports OpenIntro (US-based nonprofit) so we can provide free desk copies to teachers interested in using OpenIntro Statistics in the classroom and expand the project to support free textbooks in other subjects.
More resources: openintro.org.
Tech Giants in Healthcare
Dr. Bertalan MeskoThis comprehensive guide, Tech Giants in Healthcare, clarifies how and why big tech companies step into healthcare, and breaks it down from one market player to the other in what direction they are going, what tools they are using and what horizons they have in front of them.
Functional event-driven architecture: Powered by Scala 3
Gabriel VolpeExplore the event-driven architecture (EDA) in a purely functional way, mainly powered by Fs2 streams in Scala 3!
Leverage your functional programming skills by designing and writing stateless microservices that scale, powered by stateful message brokers.
CCIE Service Provider Version 4 Written and Lab Exam Comprehensive Guide
Nicholas RussoThe service provider landscape has changed rapidly over the past several years. Networking vendors are continuing to propose new standards, techniques, and procedures for overcoming new challenges while concurrently reducing costs and delivering new services. Cisco has recently updated the CCIE Service Provider track to reflect these changes; this book represents the author's personal journey in achieving that certification.
Ansible for DevOps
Jeff GeerlingAnsible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server—or thousands.
Top Bundles
- #1
All the Books of The Medical Futurist
6 Books
We put together the most popular books from The Medical Futurist to provide a clear picture about the major trends shaping the future of medicine and healthcare. Digital health technologies, artificial intelligence, the future of 20 medical specialties, big pharma, data privacy, digital health investments and how technology giants such as Amazon... - #2
Practical FP in Scala + Functional event-driven architecture
2 Books
Practical FP in Scala (A hands-on approach) & Functional event-driven architecture, aka FEDA, (Powered by Scala 3), together as a bundle! The content of PFP in Scala is a requirement to understand FEDA so why not take advantage of this bundle!? - #3
Software Architecture for Developers: Volumes 1 & 2 - Technical leadership and communication
2 Books
"Software Architecture for Developers" is a practical and pragmatic guide to modern, lightweight software architecture, specifically aimed at developers. You'll learn:The essence of software architecture.Why the software architecture role should include coding, coaching and collaboration.The things that you really need to think about before... - #4
CCIE Service Provider Ultimate Study Bundle
2 Books
Piotr Jablonski, Lukasz Bromirski, and Nick Russo have joined forces to deliver the only CCIE Service Provider training resource you'll ever need. This bundle contains a detailed and challenging collection of workbook labs, plus an extensively detailed technical reference guide. All of us have earned the CCIE Service Provider certification... - #6
Pattern-Oriented Memory Forensics and Malware Detection
2 Books
This training bundle for security engineers and researchers, malware and memory forensics analysts includes two accelerated training courses for Windows memory dump analysis using WinDbg. It is also useful for technical support and escalation engineers who analyze memory dumps from complex software environments and need to check for possible... - #8
Modern C++ Collection
3 Books
Get All about Modern C++C++ Standard Library, including C++20Concurrency with Modern C++, including C++20C++20Each book has about 200 complete code examples. Updates are included. When I update one of the books, you immediately get the updated bundle. You can expect significant updates to each new C++ standard (C++23, C++26, .. ) and also...