Unknown - Python Programming The Fundamental Beginner’s Guide to Learning Python nodrm

PYTHONPROGRAMMING The Fundamental Beginners Guide to Learning Python Second Edition THOMAS JACKSON iiCopyright All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording and scanning without permission in writing by the author. Printed in the United States of America 2020 by Thomas JacksoniiiAbout the Author Thomas Jackson is a tech enthusiast with about 10 years experience in the ICT industry. He is passionate about the latest technical and technological trends. Thomas holds a Bachelor and a Masters Degree in Computer Science and Information Communication Technology respectively from MIT, Boston Massachusetts. ivWho Is This Book Aimed At? This book is best suited for beginners.

It is intended for anyone who so far has not engaged seriously in programming and would like to begin doing it. This book starts from scratch and introduces you step by step into the fundamentals of programming. It wont teach you absolutely everything you might need for becoming a software engineer and working at a software company, but it will lay the groundwork on which you can build up technological knowledge and skills, and through them you will be able to turn programming into your profession. If youve never written a computer program, dont worry. There is always a first time. In this book we will teach you how to program from scratch.

We do not expect any previous knowledge or abilities. All you need is some basic computer literacy and a desire to take up programming. The rest you will learn from the book. vTable of Contentviviiviiiixx

Python is an interpreted, general-purpose, object-oriented, high-level programming language developed in 1991 by Guido van Rossum. The design principle underpinning Python stresses on the readability of code, which is characterized by the use of significant white space. Python's language constructs and object-oriented approach aim to help programmers write clear, logical code for large and small-scale projects.

The purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensible introduction to python for beginners. This book seeks to provide a platform to learn python programming well by including step by step illustrative examples and exercises. Python can be used to perform to perform programming tasks ranging from web and desktop application development to data science and machine learning. Unlike many similar languages, its core language is very small and easy to master, while allowing the addition of modules to perform a virtually limitless variety of tasks. Features of PythonPython is Easy Python is relatively an easy language to get started with programming. The ease of use is underscored by the fact that the codes written in python looks similar to the English language.

This feature makes python an ideal language for entry-level programming, and also for introduction programming concepts to beginners. Cross-Platform Language Python is platform independent, which means that it programs can run across different operating systems without needing specific or extensive changes. Thus, Python is a portable language. Python is Dynamically Typed Another feature of Python is that it is dynamically typed. What this means is that the data type of a variable is decided at the run time as opposed to statically typed when the data type is checked before execution. Python is Strongly Typed A programming language is said to be strongly typed if type of a value does not change in unexpected ways. Python is Strongly Typed A programming language is said to be strongly typed if type of a value does not change in unexpected ways.

That is, a string containing only numerals does not automatically become a number, as may occur in Perl. In python, every change of data type requires an explicit conversion. Large Libraries Python provides users with a large range of libraries, which makes it easy to add functionalities to your code without reinventing new approaches. GETTING STARTED In this chapter you will learn how to download and install Python on your computer, run its built-in programming environment, and create your very first Python program. You can simply install core Python and use a text editor like notepad to write Python programs. These programs can then be run via command line utilities.

The other option is to install an Integrated Develop Environment (IDE) for Python. IDE provides a complete programming environment including Python installation, Editors and debugging tools. Most of the advanced programmers take the IDE route for Python development. We are also going to take the same route. Pycharm is the IDE that we are going to make use of throughout this book. Python 3.8 is the latest version, as of December 2019. Python 3.8 is the latest version, as of December 2019.

The coding exercises in this book assume that you are using this version of Python 3, or at least a version close to it. Installing Python is easy and straightforward, and should proceed without any problem. Choosing a Text Editor The next step is to choose a text editor, since you are going to be writing a bunch of codes, you are going to need some environment of some program that you can write all that code in. You can write python in any text editor like a notepad, it doesn't really matter but there are special text editors that are designed just for writing python codes, and these are called IDE (Integrated Development Environment). It's basically just a special environment where we can you run and execute our python code. It basically like tell us how we're doing so were the only if we write something that's wrong or we have errors it'll kind of point us in the right direction of what we need to do to fix it.

In this book we are going to make use of PyCharm. Downloading PyCharm To install PyCharm, head over to this website https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm. When you click on the DOWNLOAD button, you will get this page that shows two versions of PyCharm. One is a professional version which is a paid version. The other is the community version and it is free and open source. Download the community version, it has everything we need to get started using python.

Installing PyCharm is also easy and straightforward, and should proceed without any problem. Running your First Program We have installed environment required to run Python scripts. Now we are going to run our first python program to see how it works. First thing is to open PyCharm editor. You can see the introductory screen for PyCharm. You will need to select a location. 1. 1.

You can select the location where you want the project to be created. If you dont want to change location than keep it as it is but at least change the name from untitled to something more meaningful, like MyProject. 2. PyCharm should have found the Python interpreter you installed earlier. 3.

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