Learn Python The Hard Way

This simple book is meant to get you started in programming. The title says it's the hard way to learn to write code bu

With the help of this book, you will do the incredibly simple things that all programmers do to learn a programming lang

This exercise has no code. It is simply the exercise you complete to get your computer to run Python. You should foll

Warning If you skipped Exercise 0 then you are not doing this book right. You must read every single thing I write here

Comments are very important in your programs. They are used to tell you what something does in English, and they are us

Every programming language has some kind of way of doing numbers and math. Do not worry: programmers lie frequently abo

Now you can print things with print and you can do math. The next step is to learn about variables. In programming a v

Now we'll do even more typing of variables and printing them out. This time we'll use something called a "format string

While you have been writing strings, you still do not know what they do. In this exercise we create a bunch of variable

Now we are going to do a bunch of exercises where you just type code in and make it run. I won't be explaining this exe

We will now see how to do a more complicated formatting of a string. This code looks complex, but if you do your commen

By now you should realize the pattern for this book is to use more than one exercise to teach you something new. I start

In Exercise 9 I threw you some new stuff, just to keep you on your toes. I showed you two ways to make a string that go

Now it is time to pick up the pace. You are doing a lot of printing to get you familiar with typing simple things, but

When you typed raw_input() you were typing the ( and ) characters, which are parenthesis characters. This is similar to

In this exercise we will cover one more input method you can use to pass variables to a script (script being another nam

Let's do one exercise that uses argv and raw_input together to ask the user something specific. You will need this for

You know how to get input from a user with raw_input or argv. Now you will learn about reading from a file. You may ha

If you did the Study Drills from the last exercise you should have seen all sorts of commands (methods/functions) you ca

Now let's do a few more things with files. We'll write a Python script to copy one file to another. It'll be very shor

Big title, right? I am about to introduce you to the function! Dum dum dah! Every programmer will go on and on about

Functions may have been a mind-blowing amount of information, but do not worry. Just keep doing these exercises and goi

Remember your checklist for functions, then do this exercise paying close attention to how functions and files can work

You have been using the = character to name variables and set them to numbers or strings. We're now going to blow your

There won't be any code in this exercise or the next one, so there's no What You Should See or Study Drills either. In

You should have spent the last week getting your list of symbols straight and locked in your mind. Now you get to apply

You are getting to the end of this section. You should have enough Python "under your fingers" to move on to learning ab

We're going to do some more practice involving functions and variables to make sure you know them well. This exercise s

You are almost done with the first half of the book. The second half is where things get interesting. You will learn lo

Today is the day you start learning about logic. Up to this point you have done everything you possibly can reading and

The logic combinations you learned from the last exercise are called "boolean" logic expressions. Boolean logic is used

Here is the next script of Python you will enter, which introduces you to the if-statement. Type this in, make it run e

In the last exercise you worked out some if-statement and then tried to guess what they are and how they work. Before y

In the first half of this book you mostly just printed out things called functions, but everything was basically in a st

You should now be able to do some programs that are much more interesting. If you have been keeping up, you should real

Now to totally blow your mind with a new loop, the while-loop. A while-loop will keep executing the code block under it

Lists are pretty useful, but unless you can get at the things in them they aren't all that good. You can already go thr

You have learned if-statements, functions, and lists. Now it's time to bend your mind. Type this in, and see if you ca

Now that you know if-statements, I'm going to give you some rules for for-loops and while-loops that will keep you out o

It's time to review the symbols and Python words you know and to try to pick up a few more for the next few lessons. I

You have learned about lists. When you learned about while-loops you "appended" numbers to the end of a list and printed

You are now going to learn about the Dictionary data structure in Python. A Dictionary (or "dict") is a way to store da

You know how a dictionary is created and used and that it is a way to map one thing to another. That means if you have

In this exercise I'm going to teach you how to speak "object oriented." What I'll do is give you a small set of words w

An important concept that you have to understand is the difference between a class and an object. The problem is, there

I'm going to describe a process to use when you want to build something using Python, specifically with object-oriented

In the fairy tales about heroes defeating evil villains there's always a dark forest of some kind. It could be a cave,

You need to start learning to feed yourself. Hopefully as you have worked through this book, you have learned that all

This will be where you start learning how to set up a good project "skeleton" directory. This skeleton directory will h

Having to type commands into your game over and over to make sure it's working is annoying. Wouldn't it be better to wr

In past games you handled the user's input by simply expecting set strings. If the user typed "run", and exactly "run",

What we should be able to get from our little game lexicon scanner is a list that looks like this: Python 2.7.11 (defaul

These final three exercises will be very hard and you should take your time with them. In this first one you'll build a

While it's exciting to see the browser display "Hello World," it's even more exciting to let the user submit text to you

We're coming to the end of the book, and in this exercise I'm going to really challenge you. When you're done, you'll b

You've finished this book and have decided to continue with programming. Maybe it will be a career for you, or maybe it

You're not a programmer quite yet. I like to think of this book as giving you your "programming black belt." You know

Appendix A: Command Line Crash Course This appendix is a quick super fast course in using the command line. It is inten