Learn Python the Hard Way

You Will Learn Python! Zed Shaw has created the world's most reliable system for learning Python. Follow it and you will succeed--just like the millions of beginners Zed has taught to date! You bring the discipline, persistence, and attention; the author supplies the masterful knowledge you need to succeed. In Learn Python the Hard Way, Fifth Edition, you'll learn Python by working through 60 lovingly crafted exercises. Read them. Type in the code. Run it. Fix your mistakes. Repeat. As you do, you'll learn how a computer works, how to solve problems, and how to enjoy programming . . . even when it's driving you crazy. Install a complete Python environment Organize and write code Fix and break code Basic mathematics Strings and text Interact with users Work with files Looping and logic Object-oriented programming Data structures using lists and dictionaries Modules, classes, and objects Python packaging Automated testing Basic SQL for Data Science Web scraping Fixing bad data (munging) The "Data" part of "Data Science" It'll be frustrating at first. But if you keep trying, you'll get it--and it'll feel amazing! This course will reward you for every minute you put into it. Soon, you'll know one of the world's most powerful, popular programming languages. You'll be a Python programmer. This Book Is Perfect For Total beginners with zero programming experience Junior developers who know one or two languages Returning professionals who haven't written code in years Aspiring Data Scientists or academics who need to learn to code Seasoned professionals looking for a fast, simple crash course in Python for Data Science Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Table of Contents:
Preface xix Module 1: Getting Started in Python 1 Exercise 0: Gearing Up 2 General Instructions 2 Minimalist Start 3 Complete Instructions 3 Testing Your Setup 3 Learning the Command Line 4 Next Steps 5 Exercise 1: A Good First Program 6 What You Should See 7 Study Drills 8 Common Student Questions 9 The Blue Plus 9 Exercise 2: Comments and Pound Characters 10 What You Should See 10 Study Drills 10 Common Student Questions 11 Exercise 3: Numbers and Math 12 What You Should See 13 Study Drills 13 Common Student Questions 13 Exercise 4: Variables and Names 16 What You Should See 17 Study Drills 17 Common Student Questions 17 Exercise 5: More Variables and Printing 20 What You Should See 20 Study Drills 21 Common Student Questions 21 Exercise 6: Strings and Text 22 What You Should See 23 Study Drills 23 Break It 23 Common Student Questions 24 Exercise 7: Combining Strings 26 What You Should See 26 Study Drills 26 Break It 27 Common Student Questions 27 Exercise 8: Formatting Strings Manually 28 What You Should See 28 Study Drills 29 Common Student Questions 29 Exercise 9: Multi-Line Strings 30 What You Should See 30 Study Drills 31 Common Student Questions 31 Exercise 10: Escape Codes in Strings 32 What You Should See 33 Escape Sequences 33 Study Drills 34 Common Student Questions 34 Exercise 11: Asking People Questions 36 What You Should See 36 Study Drills 37 Common Student Questions 37 Exercise 12: An Easier Way to Prompt 38 What You Should See 38 Study Drills 38 Common Student Questions 39 Exercise 13: Parameters, Unpacking, Variables 40 Code Description 41 Hold Up! Features Have Another Name 42 What You Should See 42 Study Drills 43 Common Student Questions 43 Exercise 14: Prompting and Passing 46 What You Should See 47 Study Drills 47 Common Student Questions 47 Exercise 15: Reading Files 50 What You Should See 51 Study Drills 51 Common Student Questions 52 Exercise 16: Reading and Writing Files 54 What You Should See 55 Study Drills 55 Common Student Questions 56 Exercise 17: More Files 58 What You Should See 59 Study Drills 59 Common Student Questions 59 Module 2: The Basics of Programming 61 Exercise 18: Names, Variables, Code, Functions 62 Exercise Code 63 What You Should See 65 Study Drills 65 Common Student Questions 66 Exercise 19: Functions and Variables 68 What You Should See 69 Study Drills 70 Common Student Questions 70 Exercise 20: Functions and Files 72 What You Should See 73 Study Drills 73 Common Student Questions 74 Exercise 21: Functions Can Return Something 76 What You Should See 77 Study Drills 77 Common Student Questions 78 Exercise 22: Strings, Bytes, and Character Encodings 80 Initial Research 80 Switches, Conventions, and Encodings 82 Dissecting the Output 84 Dissecting the Code 84 Encodings Deep Dive 86 Breaking It 87 Exercise 23: Introductory Lists 88 Accessing Elements of a List 88 Practicing Lists 89 The Code 89 The Challenge 90 Final Challenge 91 Exercise 24: Introductory Dictionaries 92 Key/Value Structures 92 Combining Lists with Data Objects 93 The Code 94 What You Should See 95 The Challenge 95 Final Challenge 96 Exercise 25: Dictionaries and Functions 98 Step 1: Function Names Are Variables 98 Step 2: Dictionaries with Variables 98 Step 3: Dictionaries with Functions 99 Step 4: Deciphering the Last Line 99 Study Drill 100 Exercise 26: Dictionaries and Modules 102 Step 1: Review of import 102 Step 2: Find the __dict__ 102 Step 3: Change the __dict__ 103 Study Drill: Find the "Dunders" 104 Exercise 27: The Five Simple Rules to the Game of Code 106 Rule 1: Everything Is a Sequence of Instructions 106 Rule 2: Jumps Make the Sequence Non-Linear 108 Rule 3: Tests Control Jumps 110 Rule 4: Storage Controls Tests 111 Rule 5: Input/Output Controls Storage 112 Putting It All Together 113 Exercise 28: Memorizing Logic 116 The Truth Terms 116 The Truth Tables 117 Common Student Questions 119 Exercise 29: Boolean Practice 120 What You Should See 122 Study Drills 122 Common Student Questions 122 Exercise 30: What If 124 What You Should See 124 dis() It 125 Study Drill 125 Common Student Questions 125 Exercise 31: Else and If 126 What You Should See 127 dis() It 127 Study Drills 128 Common Student Questions 128 Exercise 32: Making Decisions 130 What You Should See 131 dis() It 131 Study Drills 132 Common Student Questions 132 Exercise 33: Loops and Lists 134 What You Should See 135 dis() It 136 Study Drills 137 Common Student Questions 137 Exercise 34: While Loops 138 What You Should See 139 dis() It 139 Study Drills 140 Common Student Questions 140 Exercise 35: Branches and Functions 142 What You Should See 143 Study Drills 144 Common Student Questions 144 Exercise 36: Designing and Debugging 146 From Idea to Working Code 146 Rules for If-Statements 149 Rules for Loops 149 Tips for Debugging 149 Homework 150 Exercise 37: Symbol Review 152 Keywords 152 Data Types 153 String Escape Sequences 154 Old-Style String Formats 154 Operators 155 Reading Code 156 Study Drills 157 Common Student Questions 157 Module 3: Applying What You Know 159 Exercise 38: Beyond Jupyter for Windows 160 Why Learn PowerShell? 161 What Is PowerShell? 161 Crash Landing 171 Exercise 39: Beyond Jupyter for macOS/Linux 172 Why Learn Bash or ZSH? 173 What Is Bash? 173 Crash Landing 184 Exercise 40: Advanced Developer Tools 186 Managing conda Environments 186 Adding conda-forge 187 Using pip 188 Using a .condarc 188 General Editing Tips 189 Going Further 189 Exercise 41: A Project Skeleton 190 Activate an Environment 190 Just Use cookiecutter 190 Building Your Project 191 Installing Your Project 191 Testing the Install 192 Remove test-project 192 Common Errors 193 Study Drills 193 Exercise 42: Doing Things to Lists 194 What You Should See 195 What Lists Can Do 196 When to Use Lists 197 Study Drills 197 Common Student Questions 198 Exercise 43: Doing Things to Dictionaries 200 A Dictionary Example 201 What You Should See 203 What Dictionaries Can Do 203 Study Drills 204 Common Student Questions 204 Exercise 44: From Dictionaries to Objects 206 Step 1: Passing a Dict to a Function 206 Step 2: talk inside the Dict 207 Step 3: Closures 208 Step 4: A Person Constructor 209 Study Drills 211 Exercise 45: Basic Object-Oriented Programming 212 Python's People 212 Using dir() and __dict__ 213 About the Dot (.) 214 Terminology 215 A Word on self 216 Study Drills 217 Common Student Questions 217 Exercise 46: Inheritance and Advanced OOP 218 How This Looks in Code 219 About class Name(object) 221 Study Drills 221 Common Student Questions 222 Exercise 47: Basic Object-Oriented Analysis and Design 224 The Analysis of a Simple Game Engine 225 Top Down versus Bottom Up 229 The Code for "Gothons from Planet Percal #25" 230 What You Should See 236 Study Drills 237 Common Student Questions 237 Exercise 48: Inheritance versus Composition 238 What Is Inheritance? 238 The Reason for super() 243 Composition 243 When to Use Inheritance or Composition 245 Study Drill 245 Common Student Questions 246 Exercise 49: You Make a Game 248 Evaluating Your Game 248 Function Style 249 Class Style 249 Code Style 250 Good Comments 250 Evaluate Your Game 250 Exercise 50: Automated Testing 252 What Is the Purpose of Testing? 252 How to Test Efficiently 252 Install PyTest 253 Simple PyTest Demo 254 Running pytest 255 Exceptions and try/except 255 Getting Coverage Reports 256 Study Drills 256 Common Student Questions 257 Module 4: Python and Data Science 259 Exercise 51: What Is Data Munging? 260 Why Data Munging? 261 The Problem 261 The Setup 262 How to Code 262 Process Example 263 Solution Strategies 265 Awesome ETL Tools 266 Study Drills 266 Exercise 52: Scraping Data from the Web 268 Introducing with 268 The Problem 269 The Setup 269 The Clue 270 Awesome Scraping Tools 270 Study Drills 271 Exercise 53: Getting Data from APIs 272 Introducing JSON 272 The Problem 273 The Setup 274 The Clue 274 Awesome API Tools 275 Study Drills 275 Exercise 54: Data Conversion with pandas 276 Introducing Pandoc 276 The Problem 276 The Setup 277 The Clue 277 Study Drills 278 Exercise 55: How to Read Documentation (Featuring pandas) 280 Why Programmer Documentation Sucks 280 How to Actively Read Programmer Docs 281 Step #1: Find the Docs 281 Step #2: Determine Your Strategy 282 Step #3: Code First, Docs Second 283 Step #4: Break or Change the Code 283 Step #5: Take Notes 284 Step #6: Use It on Your Own 284 Step #7: Write About What You Learned 284 Step #8: What’s the Gestalt? 285 Reading My pandas Curriculum 286 Exercise 56: Using Only pandas 288 Make a Project 288 The Problem 288 The Setup 289 Study Drill 289 Exercise 57: The SQL Crash Course 290 What Is SQL? 290 The Setup 291 Fixing and Loading 292 Create, Read, Update, Delete 293 SELECT 293 Date and Time 294 INSERT 295 UPDATE 296 DELETE and Transactions 297 Math, Aggregates, and GROUP BY 298 Python Access 299 Exercise 58: SQL Normalization 300 What Is Normalization? 300 First Normal Form 301 Second Normal Form (2NF) 303 Querying 2NF Data 306 Querying with Joins 308 Study Drills 308 Exercise 59: SQL Relationships 310 One-to-Many (1:M) 310 Many-to-Many (M:M) 311 One-to-One (1:1) 312 Attributed Relations 313 Querying M:M Tables 313 Your Last Study Drill 314 Exercise 60: Advice from an Even Older Programmer 316 Index 318

About the Author :
Zed A. Shaw is the author of the popular books, Learn Python the Hard Way, Learn Ruby the Hard Way, and Learn C the Hard Way. He is also the creator of several open source software projects and has been programming and writing for nearly 30 years. Most of his free time is devoted to the study of painting and art history.