Automate the Boring Stuff with Python

Chapter 1. Python Basics

The Python programming language has a wide range of syntactical constructions, standard library functions, and interactive development environment features. Fortunately, you can ignore most of that; you just need to learn enough to write some handy little programs.

You will, however, have to learn some basic programming concepts before you can do anything. Like a wizard-in-training, you might think these concepts seem arcane and tedious, but with some knowledge and practice, you’ll be able to command your computer like a magic wand to perform incredible feats.

This chapter has a few examples that encourage you to type into the interactive shell, which lets you execute Python instructions one at a time and shows you the results ...