Table of contents
Preface
To the student
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Programming and the Python Shell
Why learn a programming language?
Compilation and interpretation
The Python shell
Hello, Python!
Syntax and semantics
Introduction to binary numbers
Exercises
Types and literals
What are types?
Dynamic typing
Types and memory
More on string literals
Representation error of numeric types
Exercises
Variables, statements, and expressions
Variables and assignment
Expressions
Augmented assignment operators
Euclidean or floor'' division
Modular arithmetic
Exponentiation
Exceptions
Exercises
Functions
Introduction to functions
A deeper dive into functions
Passing arguments to a function
Scope
Pure and impure functions
The math module
Exceptions
Exercises
Style
The importance of style
PEP 8
Whitespace
Names (identifiers)
Line length
Constants
Comments in code
Exercises
Console I/O
Motivation
Command line interface
The input() function
Converting strings to numeric types
Some ways to format output
Python f-strings and string interpolation
Format specifiers
Scientific notation
Formatting tables
Example: currency converter
Format specifiers: a quick reference
Exceptions
Exercises
Branching and Boolean expressions
Boolean logic and Boolean expressions
Comparison operators
Branching
if, elif, and else
Truthy and falsey
Input validation
Some string methods
Flow charts
Decision trees
Exercises
Structure, development, and testing
main the Python way
Program structure
Iterative and incremental development
Testing your code
The origin of the termbug''
Using assertions to test your code
Rubberducking
Exceptions
Exercises
Sequences
Lists
Tuples
Mutability and immutability
Subscripts are indices
Concatenating lists and tuples
Copying lists
Finding an element within a sequence
Sequence unpacking
Strings are sequences
Sequences: a quick reference guide
Slicing
Passing mutables to functions
Exceptions
Exercises
Loops and iteration
Loops: an introduction
while loops
Input validation with while loops
An ancient algorithm with a while loop
for loops
Iterables
Iterating over strings
Calculating a sum in a loop
Loops and summations
Products
enumerate()
Tracing a loop
Nested loops
Stacks and queues
A deeper dive into iteration in Python
Exercises
Randomness, games, and simulations
The random module
Pseudo-randomness in more detail
Using the seed
Exercises
File I/O
Context managers
Reading from a file
Writing to a file
Keyword arguments
More on printing strings
The csv module
Exceptions
Exercises
Data analysis and presentation
Some elementary statistics
Python's statistics module
A brief introduction to plotting with Matplotlib
The basics of Matplotlib
Exceptions
Exercises
Exception handling
Exceptions
Handling exceptions
Exceptions and flow of control
Exercises
Dictionaries
Introduction to dictionaries
Iterating over dictionaries
Deleting dictionary keys
Hashables
Counting letters in a string
Exceptions
Exercises
Graphs
Introduction to graphs
Searching a graph: breadth-first search
Exercises
Appendices
Glossary
Mathematical notation
pip and venv
File systems
Code for cover artwork
Index
