Preface¶

I have been teaching programming in Computer Science for more than 40 years starting with University of Waterloo (as teaching assistant), National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University and then Singapore University of Technology and Design. I have taught courses in programming languages such as C, Java and Python.

I have been a programmer, though, and have worked in the industry, off and on, since 1983.

Python is the programming language to be taught to all first-year students at Singapore University of Technology and Design. As a powerful and high level programming language, Python is ideal for the introduction to programming, which is useful for all disciplines. In my teaching, I constantly find the need for ways to make my explanations as simple as possible. A concept, no matter how simple it seems to us computer scientists, may raise profound questions among students. For example, why is x = x + 1 a valid statement but not equivalent to the contradicting equation 0 = 1 when x is 0? How can three lines of static code lead to a thousand statements being executed dynamically?

The doubts faced by many students are real. They have bothered students in the past and they will bother the students again.

This has become my motivation and then the birth of this book - a book that must be handy to my students who have supported me throughout my many years of teaching Python programming language.

In this e-book, I am going to cover the basics of Python Programming for a person who has no experience at all in programming.

One of the most important things that you can do when you are learning a programming language is to write programs. Unfortunately, typical e-books allow you to read about programming, but don’t allow you to practise. This e-book is written using activecode that allows you to write, modify, and execute programs right in the text itself. This e-book provides an excellent environment for learning Python programming language since you can experiment with the language as you are reading.

I believe the topics in this book will give you a good beginning foundation to becoming a competent, and even expert Python programmer.

Once you finish this book, I would encourage you to look at books for further skill called web programming with Python. In that, you will learn how to use Python to do lots of different types of web programming from screen scraping to creating your own web applications using platform called Django.

So, without further ado I encourage you to move onto the first chapter of this book.

G.S. Ng

© Copyright 2024 GS Ng.