John Hunt - Advanced Guide to Python 3 Programming

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Some of the key aspects of this book are:

Each chapter has a brief introduction, the main body of the chapter, followed by a list of online references that can be used for further reading.

Following this there is typically an Exercises section that lists one or more exercises that build on the skills you will have learnt in that chapter.

Sample solutions to the exercises are available in a GitHub repository that supports this book.

You can of course just read this book; however following the examples in this book will ensure that you get as much as possible out of the content.

For this you will need a computer.

Python is a cross platform programming language and as such you can use Python on a Windows PC, a Linux Box or an Apple Mac etc. This means that you are not tied to a particular type of operating system; you can use whatever you have available.

However you will need to install some software on your computer. At a minimum you will need Python. The focus of this book is Python 3 so that is the version that is assumed for all examples and exercises. As Python is available for a wide range of platforms from Windows, to Mac OS and Linux; you will need to ensure that you download the version for your operating system.

Python can be downloaded from the main Python web site which can be found at http://www.python.org .

You will also need some form of editor in which to write your programs. There are numerous generic programming editors available for different operating systems with VIM on Linux, Notepad++ on Windows and Sublime Text on Windows and Macs being popular choices.

However, using a IDE (Integrated Development Environment) editor such as PyCharm can make writing and running your programs much easier.

However, this book doesnt assume any particular editor, IDE or environment (other than Python 3 itself).

Currently there are two main versions of Python called Python 2 and Python 3.

It may not look like much of a difference but the inclusion of the () marks a major change and means that any code written for one version of Python will probably not run on the other version. There are tools available, such as the 2to3 utility, that will (partially) automate translation from Python 2 to Python 3 but in general you are still left with significant work to do.