Thanks to Clifford Colby and Elissa Rabellino, for their expertise and patience in bringing this book to life; to the many students at SFU who continue to teach me how best to learn Python; to John Edgar and the other computer science teachers at SFU with whom I’ve had the pleasure to work; to Bonnie, for her wise advice to avoid using the word blithering more than once in these acknowledgments; and to Thomas, for resisting the at-times clearly overwhelming urge to eat, tear, or suck on early drafts of this book.

And a special thank-you to Guido van Rossum and the rest of the Python community, for creating a programming language that is so much fun to use.