Python is a high-level programming language. That means that it's easy to learn and work with, so it's a great choice for a first programming language.
No tutorial is good for everyone. This one is aimed at people with no programming experience at all or very little programming experience. If you have programmed a lot in the past using some other language you probably want to read the official tutorial instead.
This tutorial was written in Python 3, and you need Python 3 or newer to be able to run the example code yourself. Python 2 is getting outdated all the time, and more and more projects are moving to Python 3. There are a few popular libraries that don't support Python 3 that well at the time of writing this, but you don't need to worry about that just yet. They will probably support Python 3 by the time you've learned the basics and you may actually need them.
I have tested most of the code in this tutorial on Python 3.4, but everything should also work on Python 3.3, 3.2 and all newer Pythons.
The tutorial consists of two sections:
This section will get you started with using Python and you'll be able to learn more about whatever you want after studying it.
- What is programming?
- Installing Python
- Getting started with Python
- ThinkPython: The way of the program
- Variables, Booleans and None
- Using functions
- If, else and elif
- Handy stuff with strings
- Lists and tuples
- Loops
- Trey Hunner: zip and enumerate
- Dictionaries
- Defining functions
- Writing a larger program
- What is true?
- Files
- Exceptions
- Modules
- Classes
If you want to learn more advanced techniques, you can also read this section. Most of the techniques explained here are great when you're working on a large project, and your code would be really repetitive without these things.
You can experient with these things freely, but please don't use these techniques just because you know how to use them. Prefer the simple techniques from the Basics part instead when possible. Simple is better than complex.
- Important: getting help
- Contact me
- Setting up a text editor
- Answers for excercises in basics and advanced sections
- The TODO list
You can star this tutorial. Starring is free for you, but it tells me and other people that you like this tutorial.
Go here if you aren't here already and click the "Star" button in the top right corner. You will be asked to create a GitHub account if you don't already have one.
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Go here if you aren't here already.
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Click the big green "Clone or download" button in the top right of the page, then click "Download ZIP".
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Extract the ZIP and open it. Unfortunately I don't have any more specific instructions because how exactly this is done depends on which operating system you run.
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Run
make-html.pyand follow the instructions.
If you have git and you know how to use it, you can also clone the
repository instead of downloading a zip and extracting it. An advantage
with doing it this way is that you don't need to download the whole
tutorial again to get the latest version of it, all you need to do is to
pull with git and run make-html.py again.
I'm Akuli and I have written most of this tutorial, but these people have helped me with it:
- SpiritualForest: Lots of typing error fixes.
- theelous3: Small improvements and fixes.
You may use this tutorial freely at your own risk. See LICENSE.