Python Tutorial for Beginners in PDF

Contents

• Whetting Your Appetite
• Using the Python Interpreter
• An Informal Introduction to Python
• More Control Flow Tools
• Data Structures
• Modules, Input and Output
• Errors and Exceptions
• Classes, Brief Tour of the Standard Library
• Brief Tour of the Standard Library — Part II
• Virtual Environments and Packages, What Now?
• Interactive Input Editing and History Substitution
• Floating Point Arithmetic: Issues and Limitations

Learning the Python Tutorial

• Python is a powerful programming language that is also very accessible. It uses a minimalistic but powerful approach to object-oriented programming and has efficient high-level data structures. Functions and data types written in C or C++ can be easily plugged into the Python interpreter (or other languages callable from C). Since Python is an interpretive language, it can speed up the process of writing code. It provides a large library of predefined modules that can serve as the building blocks for your own applications.
• The interpreter is interactive, so you can try out different linguistic elements with relative ease. On most computers, /usr/local/bin/python3.7 is where you'll find the Python interpreter. The remainder of this guide provides an introductory overview of Python, followed by a series of examples demonstrating its various features. The Python programming language was named after the Monty Python and the Holy Grail TV show. If you get a prompt and press Control-P, Python's command-line interpreter will launch.
• It is interactive and reads and runs commands much like the Unix shell. On systems that support readline, you can use interactive editing tools like history substitution and code completion. The UTF-8 encoding scheme is assumed for source files by default. After a -c command or -m module, the options are passed to the specified command or module via the sys.argv variable. The presence or absence of prompts is what differentiates output from input.
• Python comments are denoted with a hash character (#) and run to the end of the line. Since Python does not understand comments, you can skip typing them in when entering code to show how something is done. Python fully supports a wide variety of number formats, including int, float, and others like decimal and fraction. Complex numbers are natively supported, and the j or J suffix is used to denote them. In interactive mode, the variable is set to the last expression that was printed.
• You shouldn't give it a value directly because doing so would obscure the built-in variable with a new local variable of the same name. It is possible to prevent the display of spam eggs and other special characters by using backslashes or single quotes around them. The string will include line breaks by default, but you can prevent this by appending a to the end of the line. Subscripting (indexing) allows for the first character in a string to be assigned the value 0, and negative numbers to be assigned beginning with -1. When you slice, you get a substring.
• Python's for statement allows you to perform an iteration on a sequence of items in alphabetical order. The else clause is completely discretionary, and there can be zero or more elif clauses. In addition to simple numbers, the built-in function range() can also produce arithmetic progressions. The object returned by the for statement can be used as a data source by other constructs and functions that require a source from which to retrieve subsequent items. The else clause of a loop statement is executed when the loop either finishes iterating due to the list's end (with for) or the condition being false (with while).