My goal here is for something that is partly a tutorial and partly a reference book. I like how tutorials get you up and running quickly, but they can often be a little wordy and disorganized. Reference books contain a lot of good information, but they are often too terse, and they donβt often give you a sense of what is important. My aim here is for something in the spirit of a tutorial but still useful as a reference. I summarize information in tables and give a lot of short example programs. I also like to jump right into things and fill in background information as I go, rather than covering the background material first.
The style of programming in this book is geared towards the kinds of programming things I like to doβshort programs, often of a mathematical nature, small utilities to make my life easier, and small computer games. In fact, the things I cover in the book are the things that I have found most useful or interesting in my programming experience, and this book serves partly to document those things for myself. This book is not designed as a thorough preparation for a career in software engineering. Interested readers should progress from this book to a book that has more on computer science and the design and organization of large programs.
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.
Part II is about graphics, mostly GUI programming with Tkinter. You can very quickly write some nice programs using Tkinter. For instance, Section 15.7 presents a 20-line working (though not perfect) tic-tac-toe game. The final chapter of Part II covers a bit about the Python Imaging Library.
Part III contains a lot of the fun and interesting things you can do with Python. If you are structur-ing a one-semester course around this book, you might want to pick a few topics in Part III to go over. This part of the book could also serve as a reference or as a place for interested and motivated students to learn more. All of the topics in this part of the book are things that I have found useful at one point or another.
Though this book was designed to be used in an introductory programming course, it is also useful for those with prior programming experience looking to learn Python. If you are one of those people, you should be able to breeze through the first several chapters. You should find Part II to be a concise, but not superficial, treatment on GUI programming. Part III contains information on the features of Python that allow you to accomplish big things with surprisingly little code.
In preparing this book the Python documentation at www.python.org was indispensable. This book was composed entirely in LATEX. There are a number of LATEXpackages, particularly listings and hyperref, that were particulary helpful. LATEXcode from http://blog.miliauskas.lt/ helped me get the listings package to nicely highlight the Python code.