I have tried to write a book which has no prerequisites – and with which any intelligent person ought to be able to cope, whilst trying to be concise enough that a programmer experienced in another language might not be too annoyed by the pace or tone.
This may well not be the last book you read on Python, but one of the joys of Python is that substantial, useful programs can be constructed quickly from a relatively small set of constructs. There is enough in this book to build such useful programs, as we see in the four extended projects.
Answers and Hints are at the back of the book.
In chapter 1 we begin our exploration of Python with a series of preliminaries, introducing ways to calculate with the whole numbers, compare them with one another, and print them out. We learn about truth values and the other types of simple data which Python supports.
In chapter 2 we build little Python programs of our own, using functions to perform calculations based on changing inputs. We make decisions using conditional constructs to choose differing courses of action.
In chapter 3 we learn about Python constructs which perform actions repeatedly, for a fixed number of times or until a certain condition is met. We start to build larger, more useful programs, including interactive ones which depend upon input from the keyboard.
In chapter 4 we begin to build and manipulate larger pieces of data by combining things into lists, and querying and processing them. This increases considerably the scope of programs we can write.
In chapter 5 we expand our work with lists to manipulate strings, splitting them into words, processing them, and putting them back together. We learn how to sort lists into order, and how to build lists from scratch using list comprehensions.
In chapter 6 we learn more about printing messages and data to the screen, and use this knowledge to print nicely-formatted tables of data. We learn how to write such data to a file on the computer, instead of to the screen.
In chapter 7 we learn another way of storing data – in dictionaries which allow us to build little databases, looking up data by searching for it by name. We also work with sets, which allow us to store collections of data without repetition, in the same way as mathematical sets do.
In chapter 8 we deal with the thorny topic of errors: what do we do when an input is unexpected? When we find a number when we were expecting a list? When an item is not found in a dictionary? We learn how to report, handle, and recover from these errors.
In chapter 9 we return to the subject of files, learning how to read from them as well as write to them, and illustrate with a word counting program. We deal with errors, such as the unexpected absence of a file.
In chapter 10 we talk about real numbers, which we have avoided thus far. We show how to calculate with the trigonometric functions and how to convert between whole and real numbers by rounding.
In chapter 11 we introduce the Python Standard Library, greatly expanding the pre-built components at our disposal. We learn how to look up functions in Python’s official documentation.
In chapter 12 we build stand-alone programs which can be run from the command line, as if they were built in to the computer. We are now ready to begin on larger projects.
In project 1 we draw all sorts of pretty pictures by giving the computer instructions on how to draw them line by line. We make a graph plotter and a visual clock program.
In project 2 we write a calorie-counting program which stores its data across several files, and which allows multiple users. We build an interface for it, with several different commands. We learn how to use a standard data format, so that spreadsheet programs can load our calorie data.
In project 3 we investigate the childhood game of Noughts and Crosses, writing human and computer players, and working out some statistical properties of the game by building a structure containing all possible games.
In project 4 we learn how to manipulate photographs, turning them into greyscale, blurring them, and making animations from them.
To save typing, all the examples and exercises for this book can be found in electronic form at https://pythonfromtheverybeginning.com. The book’s errata lives there too.
The technical reviewer provided valuable corrections and suggestions, but all mistakes remain the author’s. The image of strategy for Noughts and Crosses is from “Flexible Strategy Use in Young Children’s Tic‐Tac‐Toe” by Kevin Crowley and Robert S. Siegler, and is reproduced courtesy of Elsevier.