Python for Everybody

This book assumes that everyone needs to know how to program, and that once you know how to program you will figure out what you want to do with your newfound skills.

While this book is not intended for professional programmers, professional programming can be a very rewarding job both financially and personally. Building useful, elegant, and clever programs for others to use is a very creative activity

Table of contents

• Why should you learn to write programs?
• Creativity and motivation
• Computer hardware architecture
• Understanding programming
• Words and sentences
• Conversing with Python
• Terminology: Interpreter and compiler
• Writing a program
• What is a program?
• The building blocks of programs
• What could possibly go wrong?
• Modulus operator
• String operations
• Asking the user for input
• Conditional execution
• Boolean expressions
• Logical operators
• Conditional execution
• Short-circuit evaluation of logical expressions
• Function calls
• Adding new functions
• Definitions and uses
• Flow of execution
• Parameters and arguments
• Exercises
• The while statement
• Counting and summing loops
• Maximum and minimum loops
• Debugging
• Getting the length of a string using len
• Traversal through a string with a loop
• String slices
• Strings are immutable
• Looping and counting
• The in operator
• String comparison
• String methods
• Parsing strings
• Format operator
• Debugging
• Glossary
• Exercises
• Files
• iii CONTENTS
• Letting the user choose the file name
• Using try, except, and open
• Writing files
• Debugging
• Glossary
• Lists are mutable
• Traversing a list
• List operations
• List slices
• List methods
• Deleting elements
• Lists and functions
• Lists and strings
• Parsing lines
• Objects and values
• Aliasing
• List arguments
• Debugging
• Glossary
• Exercises
• Dictionaries
• Dictionary as a set of counters
• Dictionaries and files
• Looping and dictionaries
• Advanced text parsing
• Debugging
• Tuples are immutable
• Comparing tuples
• Tuple assignment
• Dictionaries and tuples
• Multiple assignment with dictionaries
• The most common words
• Combining searching and extracting
• Escape character
• Networked programs
• Hypertext Transfer Protocol - HTTP
• The world’s simplest web browser
• Retrieving an image over HTTP
• Retrieving web pages with urllib
• Reading binary files using urllib
• Parsing HTML and scraping the web
• Parsing HTML using regular expressions
• Parsing HTML using BeautifulSoup
• Bonus section for Unix / Linux users
• Looping through nodes
• JavaScript Object Notation - JSON
• Parsing JSON
• Application Programming Interfaces
• Security and API usage
• Using objects
• Starting with programs
• Subdividing a problem
• Using Databases and SQL
• What is a database?
• Database concepts
• Database Browser for SQLite
• Creating a database table
• Structured Query Language summary
• Spidering Twitter using a database
• Basic data modeling
• Programming with multiple tables