A Practical Introduction to Python Programming

Аннотация

This book started out as about 30 pages of notes for students in my introductory programming class at Mount St. Mary’s University. Most of these students have no prior programming experience, and that has affected my approach. I leave out a lot of technical details and sometimes I oversimplify things. Some of these details are filled in later in the book, though other details are never filled in. But this book is not designed to cover everything, and I recommend reading other books and the Python documentation to fill in the gaps. The style of programming in this book is geared towards the kinds of programming things I like to do—short programs, often of a mathematical nature, small utilities to make my life easier, and small computer games. In terms of structuring a course around this book or learning on your own, the basis is most of Part I. The first four chapters are critically important. Chapter 5 is useful, but not all of it is critical. Chapter 6 (strings) should be done before Chapter 7 (lists). Chapter 8 contains some more advanced list topics. Much of this can be skipped, though it is all interesting and useful. In particular, that chapter covers list comprehensions, which I use extensively later in the book. While you can get away without using list comprehensions, they provide an elegant and efficient way of doing things. Chapter 9 (while loops) is important. Chapter 10 contains a bunch of miscellaneous topics, all of which are useful, but many can be skipped if need be. The final four chapters of Part I are about dictionaries, text files, functions, and object-oriented programming.