Chapter 1
Introduction
This book aims to teach the basics of the Python programming language using a practical
approach. Its method is quite basic though: after a very simple introduction to each topic,
the reader is invited to learn by solving the proposed exercises.
These exercises have been used extensively in my web development and distributed com-
puting classes at the Superior School of Technology of Setúbal. With these exercises,
most students are up to speed with Python in less than a month. In fact, students of
the distributed computing course, taught in the second year of the software engineering
degree, become familiar with Python’s syntax in two weeks and are able to implement a
distributed client-server application with sockets in the third week.
This book is divided in the following chapters: in chapter 2 I will provide the basic
installation instructions and execution of the Python interpreter. In chapter 3 we will
talk about the most basic data types, numbers and strings. In chapter 4 we will start
tinkering with functions, and in chapter 5 the topic is about "loops". In chapter 6 we
will work with dictionaries and finally, in chapter 7 we will finish the book with some
exercises about classes and object oriented programming.
Please note that this book is a work in progress and as such may contain quite a few
spelling errors that may be corrected in the future. However it is made available as it is
so it can be useful to anyone who wants to use it. I sincerely hope you can get something
good through it.
This book is made available in github (check it at https://github.com/joaoventura/
full-speed-python) so I welcome any pull requests to correct misspellings, to suggest
new exercises or clarification of the current content.
All the best,
João Ventura - Adjunct Professor at the Escola Superior de Tecnologia de Setúbal
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