Parker - Python 3 Pocket Primer

PYTHON 3

Pocket Primer

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PYTHON 3

Pocket Primer

James R. Parker

MERCURY LEARNING AND INFORMATION

Dulles, Virginia
Boston, Massachusetts
New Delhi

Copyright 2018 by MERCURY LEARNING AND INFORMATION LLC. All rights reserved.

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Publisher: David Pallai

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James R. Parker. Python 3 Pocket Primer.
ISBN: 978-1-68392-086-1

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934664
171819321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

This book is an effort to give a programmer sufficient knowledge of Python 3 to be able to work on their own projects. It is based on a much longer book that was intended for beginning programmers, and so most of the introductory material and basic computer science has been removed.

What remains is, first, a lot of code. Programming is something that must be practiced, and this book provides a lot of examples that are intended to inspire the explanations of programming language structures that otherwise lack context. Many of the examples are games or portions of games. Thats because most of the audience are game players of one kind or another and can understand the examples. The code that implements the game is motivated by that understanding, although there are always many different actual programs that can be written to solve any one problem.

The example code was compiled on a PC running Windows 10, using Python 3.4 and the PyCharm GUI. Working code was copied directly into the manuscript and so should always be functional, but however hard we try, sometimes errors creep in during production. Please let me know if you find one.

There are a couple of unique features of this short book. One is the chapter on PyGame, which allows a programmer to handle graphics, control mouse and keyboard interaction, and play sounds and videos. The large example for that chapter is a Lunar Lander game.

Another feature is the chapter on communication, which makes use of one of Pythons best features: a collection of modules for sending and receiving Email, communicating between computers, and working with Twitter and Web pages.

The disc that accompanies this book contains all of the code examples as complete working programs (also available for downloading from the publisher). This means that there is no need to type them in so they can be executed and perhaps modified or expanded. The disc also contains all of the figures in the book at their original size. Some of these are used as data for the programs, so its good to have them.

There is a large code base in both Python 2.7 and Python 3, and one must take care when installing and using any module that it is compatible with the version of Python that has been installedthe two are incompatible.

Python 2 vs. Python 3

Here are the critical differences between the two versions of Python.