Python: Up and Running With Python. Easy To Learn Python Programming For Beginners
"Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. Today dozens of Google engineers use Python, and we're looking for more people with skills in this language." - Peter Norvig, director of search at Google
Chapter 1: Jumping Into Python The History of Python The Benefits of Python Portability Library Support
Chapter 2: Getting Started Installing Python Installing an IDE (PyCharm) Our First Example Program Running a Program Command-Line Logs
Chapter 3: Building our First Program Indentation Variables Numbers Strings Example Variable Project Operators Conditional Operators If Statements Elif Statements Nested Statements Decision Making Example Project Loops While Loops For Loops Loop Example Project
Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics. Its high-level built in data structures, combined with dynamic typing and dynamic binding, make it very attractive for Rapid Application Development, as well as for use as a scripting or glue language to connect existing components together. Python's simple, easy to learn syntax emphasizes readability and therefore reduces the cost of program maintenance. Python supports modules and packages, which encourages program modularity and code reuse. The Python interpreter and the extensive standard library are available in source or binary form without charge for all major platforms, and can be freely distributed.
Often, programmers fall in love with Python because of the increased productivity it provides. Since there is no compilation step, the edit-test-debug cycle is incredibly fast. Debugging Python programs is easy: a bug or bad input will never cause a segmentation fault. Instead, when the interpreter discovers an error, it raises an exception. When the program doesn't catch the exception, the interpreter prints a stack trace. A source level debugger allows inspection of local and global variables, evaluation of arbitrary expressions, setting breakpoints, stepping through the code a line at a time, and so on. The debugger is written in Python itself, testifying to Python's introspective power. On the other hand, often the quickest way to debug a program is to add a few print statements to the source: the fast edit-test-debug cycle makes this simple approach very effective.
"I'm in the middle of my tour of different programming languages. After finishing up some books on JavaScript I decided to check out Python. This book gave me exactly what I needed for getting started with the language. My main concern was picking up on the syntax and what separates Python from other programming languages. It has definitely been easy to learn the fundamentals in this book!" Kyle, USA
Does a pretty good job of explaining some of the more difficult to understand aspects of Python programming, such as .self and classes. It doesn't get very in-depth however and leaves out some things that it really shouldn't. There are also a lot of misspelled words that can cause some confusion. This book was very poorly edited. As a quick startup resource it is pretty good, but not really worth $2.99. I would say $.99 would be fair since it also includes a few ads in the book itself (kinda feels like the book was just a quick money grab). Says it's 81 pages but the actual programming portion of the book only seems to make up half of that. The rest is just programming guidelines and how to debug.