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Python programming tutorial

Python is a high-level programming language. That means that it's easy to learn and work with, so it's a great choice for a first programming language.

No tutorial is good for everyone. This one is aimed at people with no programming experience at all or very little programming experience. If you have programmed a lot in the past using some other language you probably want to read the official tutorial instead.

This tutorial was written in Python 3, and you need Python 3 or newer to be able to run the example code yourself. Python 2 is getting outdated all the time, and more and more projects are moving to Python 3. There are a few popular libraries that don't support Python 3 that well at the time of writing this, but you don't need to worry about that just yet. They will probably support Python 3 by the time you've learned the basics and you may actually need them.

I have tested most of the code in this tutorial on Python 3.4, but everything should also work on Python 3.3, 3.2 and all newer Pythons.

List of contents

The tutorial consists of two sections:

Basics

This section will get you started with using Python and you'll be able to learn more about whatever you want after studying it.

  1. What is programming?
  2. Installing Python
  3. Getting started with Python
  4. ThinkPython: The way of the program
  5. Variables, Booleans and None
  6. Using functions
  7. If, else and elif
  8. Handy stuff with strings
  9. Lists and tuples
  10. Loops
  11. Trey Hunner: zip and enumerate
  12. Dictionaries
  13. Defining functions
  14. What is true?
  15. Files
  16. Exceptions
  17. Modules
  18. Classes

Advanced

If you want to learn more advanced techniques, you can also read this section. Most of the techniques explained here are great when you're working on a large project, and your code would be really repetitive without these things.

You can experient with these things freely, but please don't use these techniques just because you know how to use them. Prefer the simple techniques from the Basics part instead when possible. Simple is better than complex.

  1. Advanced stuff with functions
  2. Magic methods
  3. Iterables and iterators

Other things this tutorial comes with

How to read this tutorial without an internet connection

  1. Go here if you aren't here already.

  2. Click the big green "Clone or download" button in the top right of the page, then click "Download ZIP".

    Download ZIP

  3. Extract the ZIP and open it. Unfortunately I don't have any more specific instructions because how exactly this is done depends on which operating system you run.

  4. Run make-html.py and follow the instructions.

If you have git and you know how to use it, you can also clone the repository instead of downloading a zip and extracting it. An advantage with doing it this way is that you don't need to download the whole tutorial again to get the latest version of it, all you need to do is to pull with git and run make-html.py again.

Authors

I'm Akuli and I have written most of this tutorial, but these people have helped me with it:

You may use this tutorial freely at your own risk. See LICENSE.

List of contents