An introduction to Python for absolute beginners

An introduction to Python

for absolute beginners

Bob Dowling

University Computing Service

scientific-computing@ucs.cam.ac.uk



1

Welcome to the Computing Service's course ¡°Introduction to Python¡±.

This course is designed for people with absolutely no experience of programming.

If you have any experience in programming other languages you are going to find

this course extremely boring and you would be better off attending our course

"Python for Programmers" where we teach you how to convert what you know

from other programming languages to Python.

This course is based around Python version 3. Python has recently undergone a

change from Python 2 to Python 3 and there are some incompatibilities between

the two versions. The older versions of this course were based around Python 2

but this course is built on Python 3.

Python is named after Monty Python and its famous flying circus, not the snake. It

is a trademark of the Python Software Foundation.

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Course outline ¨D 1

Who uses Python & what for

What sort of language it is

How to launch Python

Python scripts

Text

Names for values

Reading in user data

Numbers

Conversions

Comparisons

Truth & Falsehood

2

2

Course outline ¨D 2

Assignment

Names

Our first ¡°real¡± program

Loops

if¡­ else¡­

Indentation

Comments

3

3

Course outline ¨D 3

Lists

Indices

Lengths

Changing items

Extending lists

Methods

Creating lists

Testing lists

Removing from lists

for¡­ loop

Iterables

Slices

4

4

Course outline ¨D 4

Files

Reading & writing

Writing our own functions

Tuples

Modules

System modules

External modules

Dictionaries

Formatted text

5

5

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