Contents
Preface
Improvements in the Python 3 Edition
The Hard Way Is Easier
Reading and Writing
Attention to Detail
Spotting Differences
Ask, Don’t Stare
Do Not Copy-Paste
Using the Included Videos
A Note on Practice and Persistence
Acknowledgments
Exercise 0 The Setup
macOS
macOS: What You Should See
Windows
Windows: What You Should See
Linux
Linux: What You Should See
Finding Things on the Internet
Warnings for Beginners
Alternative Text Editors
Exercise 1 A Good First Program
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 2 Comments and Pound Characters
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 3 Numbers and Math
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 4 Variables and Names
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 5 More Variables and Printing
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 6 Strings and Text
What You Should See
Study Drills
Break It
Common Student Questions
Exercise 7 More Printing
What You Should See
Study Drills
Break It
Common Student Questions
Exercise 8 Printing, Printing
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 9 Printing, Printing, Printing
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 10 What Was That?
What You Should See
Escape Sequences
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 11 Asking Questions
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 12 Prompting People
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 13 Parameters, Unpacking, Variables
Hold Up! Features Have Another Name
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 14 Prompting and Passing
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 15 Reading Files
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 16 Reading and Writing Files
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 17 More Files
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 18 Names, Variables, Code, Functions
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 19 Functions and Variables
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 20 Functions and Files
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 21 Functions Can Return Something
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 22 What Do You Know So Far?
What You Are Learning
Exercise 23 Strings, Bytes, and Character Encodings
Initial Research
Switches, Conventions, and Encodings
Disecting the Output
Disecting the Code
Encodings Deep Dive
Breaking It
Exercise 24 More Practice
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 25 Even More Practice
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 26 Congratulations, Take a Test!
Common Student Questions
Exercise 27 Memorizing Logic
The Truth Terms
The Truth Tables
Common Student Questions
Exercise 28 Boolean Practice
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 29 What If
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 30 Else and If
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 31 Making Decisions
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 32 Loops and Lists
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 33 While Loops
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 34 Accessing Elements of Lists
Study Drills
Exercise 35 Branches and Functions
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 36 Designing and Debugging
Rules for if-statements
Rules for Loops
Tips for Debugging
Homework
Exercise 37 Symbol Review
Keywords
Data Types
String Escape Sequences
Old Style String Formats
Operators
Reading Code
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 38 Doing Things to Lists
What You Should See
What Lists Can Do
When to Use Lists
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 39 Dictionaries, Oh Lovely Dictionaries
A Dictionary Example
What You Should See
What Dictionaries Can Do
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 40 Modules, Classes, and Objects
Modules Are Like Dictionaries
Classes Are Like Modules
Objects Are Like Import
Getting Things from Things
A First Class Example
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 41 Learning to Speak Object-Oriented
Word Drills
Phrase Drills
Combined Drills
A Reading Test
Practice English to Code
Reading More Code
Common Student Questions
Exercise 42 Is-A, Has-A, Objects, and Classes
How This Looks in Code
About class Name(object)
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 43 Basic Object-Oriented Analysis and Design
The Analysis of a Simple Game Engine
Write or Draw About the Problem
Extract Key Concepts and Research Them
Create a Class Hierarchy and Object Map for the Concepts
Code the Classes and a Test to Run Them
Repeat and Refine
Top Down versus Bottom Up
The Code for “Gothons from Planet Percal #25”
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 44 Inheritance versus Composition
What Is Inheritance?
Implicit Inheritance
Override Explicitly
Alter Before or After
All Three Combined
The Reason for super()
Using super() with __init__
Composition
When to Use Inheritance or Composition
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 45 You Make a Game
Evaluating Your Game
Function Style
Class Style
Code Style
Good Comments
Evaluate Your Game
Exercise 46 A Project Skeleton
macOS/Linux Setup
Windows 10 Setup
Creating the Skeleton Project Directory
Final Directory Structure
Testing Your Setup
Using the Skeleton
Required Quiz
Common Student Questions
Exercise 47 Automated Testing
Writing a Test Case
Testing Guidelines
What You Should See
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 48 Advanced User Input
Our Game Lexicon
Breaking Up a Sentence
Lexicon Tuples
Scanning Input
Exceptions and Numbers
A Test First Challenge
What You Should Test
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 49 Making Sentences
Match and Peek
The Sentence Grammar
A Word on Exceptions
The Parser Code
Playing with the Parser
What You Should Test
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 50 Your First Website
Installing flask
Make a Simple “Hello World” Project
What’s Going On?
Fixing Errors
Create Basic Templates
Study Drills
Common Student Questions
Exercise 51 Getting Input from a Browser
How the Web Works
How Forms Work
Creating HTML Forms
Creating a Layout Template
Writing Automated Tests for Forms
Study Drills
Breaking It
Exercise 52 The Start of Your Web Game
Refactoring the Exercise 43 Game
Creating an Engine
Your Final Exam
Common Student Questions
Next Steps
How to Learn Any Programming Language
Advice from an Old Programmer
Appendix Command Line Crash Course
Introduction: Shut Up and Shell
How to Use This Appendix
You Will Be Memorizing Things
The Setup
Do This
You Learned This
Do More
Paths, Folders, Directories (pwd)
Do This
You Learned This
Do More
If You Get Lost
Do This
You Learned This
Make a Directory (mkdir)
Do This
You Learned This
Do More
Change Directory (cd)
Do This
You Learned This
Do More
List Directory (ls)
Do This
You Learned This
Do More
Remove Directory (rmdir)
Do This
You Learned This
Do More
Moving Around (pushd, popd)
Do This
You Learned This
Do More
Making Empty Files (touch/New-Item)
Do This
You Learned This
Do More
Copy a File (cp)
Do This
You Learned This
Do More
Moving a File (mv)
Do This
You Learned This
Do More
View a File (less/more)
Do This
You Learned This
Do More
Stream a File (cat)
Do This
You Learned This
Do More
Removing a File (rm)
Do This
You Learned This
Do More
Exiting Your Terminal (exit)
Do This
You Learned This
Do More
Command Line Next Steps
Unix Bash References
PowerShell References
Index
