Non-Programmers Tutorial For Python

Josh Cogliati

Copyright(c) 1999-2002 Josh Cogliati.

Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the copyright notice and permission notice are preserved, and that the distributor grants the recipient permission for further redistribution as permitted by this notice.

Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions, provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last altered them.

All example python source code in this tutorial is granted to the public domain. Therefore you may modify it and relicense it under any license you please.

• Front Matter
• Contents
• Intro
  • First things first
  • Installing Python
  • Interactive Mode
  • Creating and Running Programs
  • Using Python from the command line
  
  
• Hello, World
  • What you should know
  • Printing
  • Expressions
  • Talking to humans (and other intelligent beings)
  • Examples
  • Exercises
  
  
• Who Goes There?
  • Input and Variables
  • Examples
  • Exercises
  
  
• Count to 10
  • While loops
  • Examples
  
  
• Decisions
  • If statement
  • Examples
  • Exercises
  
  
• Debugging
  • What is debugging?
  • What should the program do?
  • What does the program do?
  • How do I fix the program?
  
  
• Defining Functions
  • Creating Functions
  • Variables in functions
  • Function walkthrough
  • Examples
  • Exercises
  
  
• Lists
  • Variables with more than one value
  • More features of lists
  • Examples
  • Exercises
  
  
• For Loops
• Boolean Expressions
  • Examples
  • Exercises
  
  
• Dictionaries
• Using Modules
  • Exercises
  
  
• More on Lists
• Revenge of the Strings
  • Examples
  
  
• File IO
  • Exercises
  
  
• Dealing with the imperfect (or how to handle errors)
  • Exercises
  
  
• The End
• FAQ
• About this document ...