Python by Example Learning to Program in 150 Challenges

Python is today's fastest growing programming language. This engaging and refreshingly different guide breaks down the skills into clear step-by-step chunks and explains the theory using brief easy-to-understand language. Rather than bamboozling readers with pages of mind-numbing technical jargon, this book includes 150 practical challenges, putting the power in the reader's hands. Through creating programs to solve these challenges the reader will quickly progress from mastering the basics to confidently using subroutines, a graphical user interface, and linking to external text, csv and SQL files. This book is perfect for anyone who wants to learn how to program with Python. In particular, students starting out in computer science and teachers who want to improve their confidence in Python will find here a set of ready-made challenges for classroom use.

Introduction; Downloading Python; Some tips; Part I. Learning Python: Challenges 1–11. The basics; Challenges 12–19. If statements; Challenges 20–26. Strings; Challenges 27–34. Maths; Challenges 35–44. For loop; Challenges 45–51. While loop; Challenges 52–59. Random; Challenges 60–68. Turtle graphics; Challenges 69–79. Tuples, lists and dictionaries; Challenges 80–87. More string manipulation; Challenges 88–95. Numeric arrays; Challenges 96–103. 2D lists and dictionaries; Challenges 105–110. Reading and writing to a text file; Challenges 111–117. Reading and writing to a .csv File; Challenges 118–123. Subprograms; Challenges 124–132. Tkinter GUI; Challenges 133–138. More Tkinter; Challenges 139–145. SQLite; Part II. Chunky Challenges: 146 – Shift code; 147 – Mastermind; 148 – Passwords; 149 – Times tables (GUI); 150 – Art gallery; What next?; Glossary; Index.

Nichola Lacey is Director of Nichola Wilkin Ltd. She is a trusted source for teaching resources, having sold thousands of resources to schools around the world. As one of the most popular authors on TES, Nichola enjoys an extremely high review rating with hundreds of thousands of downloads. She was a programmer before moving into corporate training and then retraining as a teacher, and she gained a unique skill set of programming and practical classroom experience after being promoted to head of computer science in a private boys' school.