Python 3 Basics Tutorial

(c) 2015 Dr. Kristian Rother (krother@academis.eu)

with contributions by Allegra Via, Kaja Milanowska and Anna Philips

Distributed under the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike License 4.0

Sources of this document can be found on https://github.com/krother/Python3_Basics_Tutorial

Introduction

Who is this tutorial for?

This is a tutorial for novice programmers. You are the learner I had in mind when writing this tutorial if:

• you have worked a little with a different programming language like R, MATLAB or C.
• you have no programming experience at all
• you know Python well and would like to teach others

This tutorial works best if you follow the chapters and exercises step by step.

If you are an experienced programmer

If you are fluent in any programming language, this tutorial might be very easy for you. Of course, you can work through the exercises to get the Python syntax into your fingers. However, this tutorial contains very little material on the higher abstraction levels in Python, like classes, namespaces or even functions.

For a tutorial for non-beginners, I recommend the following free online books:

• Learn Python the Hard Way - a bootcamp-style tutorial by Zed Shaw
• How to think like a Computer Scientist - a very systematic, scientific tutorial by Allen B. Downey
• Dive into Python 3 - explains one sophisticated program per chapter - by Mark Pilgrim