Preface

“Introduction to Programming in Python” is a learning resource for programming novices who want to learn programming using the programming language Python in a procedural way.

This material is created for participants of the course “Introduction to Programming: Programming in Python” offered by the Digital Science Center at Universität Innsbruck.

This is not a stand-alone material to learn to program. It provides an additional content to the Python for Everybody (a textbook, lecture slides and videos), which is a base for the lecture part of the course. This material was inspired by students’ questions and successively extended since the winter semester 2018. I am grateful to my students, who were asking a lot of questions, challenging me to see the concepts from their perspectives and explain them in, hopefully, an accessible way. As the most confusion is usually in the first part of the course, the supplementary material covers the first chapters from the book.

The videos were created during the quarantine (COVID-19) as supporting material for distance teaching. I plan to successively extend and replace them with improved versions.

As for now, this learning resource has to be seen as ‘work in progress’` and there are, for sure, some typos and transposed letters which will be fixed in the (near) future. As for me, learning a programming language is easier than learning a human language. ;-) Even if it is not the case for you, I hope you will enjoy learning Python.

Reading material

Python for Everybody online, free textbook or available to by in printed form, too
My additional chapters here in the reading material part, at the moment, on chapter on testing
Pragmatic Programmer a great optional read, some best practices are taken from this book
Clean Code an optional read, some guidelines where taken from this book, focus on program qualities
Clean Coder an optional read, more focus on programing activity

Copyright Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 - Joanna Chimiak-Opoka