Learning Python - A Good Idea

Interested in learning Python? Great! You won't be disappointed. In my opinion, Python is an easy language for beginners. I say this because it is designed to have a certain amount of inherent simplicity built in. In many other popular languages, there are millions of perfectly good ways to accomplish common tasks; Python has just thousands. One of the big ideas of Python is clear, consistent organization in order to improve comprehensibility of programs. As a beginner, this should seem like a nice feature.

Simplicity is nice for people just starting out, but it's really nice for experts. The more software one writes, the more the complexity of just managing it increases. If you have not written (in any language) enough code to find yourself asking "What is this program? What does it do? How does it do it?", then you are not yet an expert. Python greatly tries to improve this situation. Some of the tricks Python uses to accomplish this goal are:

• object-oriented organization
• enforced consistent coding layout and formatting
• simple core command set
• excellent interactive interpreter support
• excellent module support e.g. imports modules on demand

Guide To This Guide

This is a collection of Python lessons that I wrote to help my friends who are interested in learning Python. I sometimes use examples from other programming languages to make a point, but you never really need to know anything about those languages. I'm hoping that a reasonably intelligent person who had never programmed before could use these lessons to get started with programming.

This is not a thorough reference work describing the complete extent of the Python language. For that I recommend the Python Pocket Reference (I have two copies, one for home and one for work). The guide that I have written is designed to be interesting and useful to complete beginners.

In order to keep the complexity low and reduce the possibility of becoming tedious, I have imposed a limit on each lesson of around 5kB.

The Lessons

Lesson 1 Messing Around Until Something Useful Happens

Lesson 2 Definitely Your Type

Lesson 3 Style is Also Substance

Lesson 4 If Whitespace Is What You Need

Lesson 5 Charming Prints

Lesson 6 While You're Studying

Lesson 7 Re: Iterating, Another Loop

...more as I write them.