This Book is for Students¶

This chapter introduces the approach used in this book and offers some quick “teasers” of things we’ll be doing later. Don’t worry if you don’t understand the code (programs - instructions that a computer can understand) that you see in this chapter. We’ll go through things much more slowly in the next few chapters. This book is intended for students who haven’t programmed before.

This electronic book is different because it uses examples plus practice. Most computer science books are about becoming professional software developers (people who write programs for a living). Most computer science courses require you to write lots of code. This book helps students learn what programming is and how it works without making you write lots of code. It will use the programming language Python, which is widely used, from companies like Google, Instagram and Facebook to engineering and scientific institutions like NASA and CERN.

Figure 1: Students in a computer classroom

• Rather than have you write lots of code, we will ask you to read a lot of code examples.
• We ask you to use what you are learning from the examples in some simple practice exercises. These exercises are meant to be short and easy.
• You don’t have to install anything. You can read, edit, and run programs all from within the pages of this eBook inside the browser.
• You can also run all the programs on your computer if you want to, since they are all written in standard Python.

Click the arrow at the bottom right side of this window to go on to the next section in this chapter. Click on the name of the book at the top left of the page to go to the table of contents.