The Coder's Apprentice: Learning Programming with Python 3 (Version 1.1)

Preface
Introduction
	How to use this book
	Prerequisites and assumptions
	Why Python?
	Python's limitations as a programming language
	What does it mean ``to think like a programmer?''
	The art of programming
	Start small, grow big
	Python 2 or Python 3?
	Practice
Using Python
	Getting Python
	Creating Python programs
	Running Python programs
	Reference material
Expressions
	Displaying results
	Data types
	Expressions
	Style
Variables
	Variables and values
	Variable names
	Debugging variables
	Soft typing
	Shorthand operators
	Comments
Simple Functions
	Elements of a function
	Some basic functions
	Modules
Conditions
	Boolean expressions
	Conditional statements
	Early exits
	Case matching
Iterations
	while loop
	for loop
	Loop control statements
	Nested loops
	The loop-and-a-half
	Being smart about loops
	On designing algorithms
Functions
	Why create functions?
	Creating functions
	Scope and lifetime
	Managing program complexity
	Modules
	Anonymous functions
Recursion
	What is recursion?
	Recursive definitions
Strings
	What you already know about strings
	Multi-line strings
	Escape sequences
	Accessing characters of a string
	Strings are immutable
	string methods
	Character encoding
Tuples
	Using tuples
	Tuples are immutable
	Applications of tuples
Lists
	List basics
	Lists are mutable
	Lists and operators
	List methods
	Aliasing
	Nested lists
	List casting
	List comprehensions
Dictionaries
	Basics of dictionaries
	Dictionary methods
	Keys
	Storing complicated values
	Lookup speed
Sets
	Basics of sets
	Set methods
	Frozensets
Operating System
	Basics of operating systems
	Command prompt
	File system
	os functions
Text Files
	Flat text files
	Reading text files
	Writing text files
	Appending to text files
	os.path methods
	File encoding
Exceptions
	Errors and exceptions
	Exception handling
	File handling exceptions
	Raising exceptions
Binary Files
	Opening and closing binary files
	Reading a binary file
	Writing a binary file
	Positioning the file pointer
Bitwise Operators
	Bits and bytes
	Manipulating bits
	Usefulness of bitwise operations
Object Orientation
	The object oriented world
	Classes and objects
	Methods
	Nesting objects
	Memory management
Operator Overloading
	The idea behind operator overloading
	Comparisons
	Calculations
	Unary operators
	Sequences
Inheritance
	Class inheritance
	Interfaces
Iterators and Generators
	Iterators
	Generators
	itertools module
Command Line Processing
	The command line
	Flexible command line processing
Regular Expressions
	Regular expressions with Python
	Writing regular expressions
	Grouping
	Replacing
File Formats
	Comma-Separated Values (CSV)
	Pickling
	JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)
	HTML and XML
Various Useful Modules
	datetime
	collections
	urllib
	glob
	statistics
Troubleshooting
Differences with Python 2
pcinput.py
pcmaze.py
Test Text Files
Answers to Exercises