Python programming tutorial

Python is a high-level, interactive and object-oriented programming language. Its simple syntax makes it easy to learn and fast to 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 uses Python 3, and you need Python 3 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 Python 2 is getting outdated all the time, and more and more projects are moving to Python 3.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 any Python 3 version or newer.

Here's a list of chapters in this tutorial. Read them one by one in the order they are listed. If you jump to a chapter without reading and understanding everything before it, you may have hard time understanding the chapter you're trying to read. However, the chapters are mostly independent from each other, so you can also use this tutorial together with other tutorials.

1. Quick introduction to this tutorial
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. ThinkPython: Lists
9. Handy stuff with strings
10. Loops
11. Files
12. Defining functions
13. Modules

Parts of this tutorial that aren't ready to be added to the rest of it yet:

• Classes

Other things this tutorial comes with:

• Important: getting help
• Contact me
• Setting up a text editor
• Answers for the exercises
• The TODO list

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

• SpiritualForest: Lots of typing error fixes.
• theelous3: Small improvements and fixes.

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