Practical Programming, 2nd Edition

Practical Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science Using Python 3, this book is for anyone who wants to understand computer programming. You’ll learn to program in a language that’ s used in millions of smartphones, tablets, and PCs. You’ll code along with the book, writing programs to solve real-world problems as you learn the fundamentals of programming using Python 3. You’ll learn about design, algorithms, testing, and debugging, and come away with all the tools you need to produce quality code. In this second edition, we’ve updated almost all the material, incorporating the lessons we’ve learned over the past five years of teaching Python to people new to programming.

You don’t need any programming experience to get started. First, you’ll get a detailed introduction to Python and to programming. You’ll find out exactly what happens when your programs are executed. Through real-world examples, you’ll learn how to work with numbers, text, big data sets, and files. Then you’ll see how to create and use your own data types.

The incremental examples show you the steps and missteps that happen while developing programs, so you know what to expect when you tackle a problem on your own. Inspired by “How to Design Programs” (HtDP), you’ll learn a six-step recipe for designing functions, which helps you as you start to learn the concepts–and becomes an integral part of writing programs by the end.

As you learn to use the fundamental programming tools in the first half of the book, you’ll see how to document and organize your code so that you and other programmers can more easily read and understand it. Beyond the basics, you’ll learn how to ensure that your programs are reliable, and how to work with databases, download data from the web automatically, and build user interfaces. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to think like a professional programmer.

You’ll need to download Python 3, available from “python.org”:https://python.org. With that download comes IDLE, the editor we use for writing and running Python programs. (If you use Linux, you may need to install Python 3 and IDLE separately.)

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. What’s Programming?
Chapter 2. Hello, Python
Chapter 3. Designing and Using Functions
Chapter 4. Working with Text
Chapter 5. Making Choices
Chapter 6. A Modular Approach to Program Organization
Chapter 7. Using Methods
Chapter 8. Storing Collections of Data Using Lists
Chapter 9. Repeating Code Using Loops
Chapter 10. Reading and Writing Files
Chapter 11. Storing Data Using Other Collection Types
Chapter 12. Designing Algorithms
Chapter 13. Searching and Sorting
Chapter 14. Object-Oriented Programming
Chapter 15. Testing and Debugging
Chapter 16. Creating Graphical User Interfaces
Chapter 17. Databases