Python was initially developed by Guido Von Rossum as a fun project and was named after his favorite show Monty Python's Flying Circus. It was developed in 1991, but it started becoming popular around 2008. A major contributor to this popularity was Google, which has developed a number of platforms using Python. Recently, Python has been popularized by cloud, DevOps, data science, data analytics, machine learning, and natural language processing. With more and more data harvesting and data processing, people want to get into new types of job roles, which require basic programming skills, and Python perfectly suits all the categories of job work. Learn Python in 7 Days has been designed to give such people an easy way to learn and master the basics of Python in 7 days. The book covers the basic and necessary concepts that are required to understand the working of the Python language. The book is for all types of readers and learners. It also acts as a refresher for experienced people. We believe that we have covered as much as possible for making it a book to be finished in seven days; however, we believe that merely reading the book is not sufficient to master programming skills. It will take more than that to achieve mastery. We hope you enjoy reading the book and use it as a good learning book.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Python, gives you the background of Python programming language, along with installation instructions and basic commands.
Chapter 2, Type Variables and Operators, gives you an idea of variable types and the various types of operators used in Python.
Chapter 3, Strings, sheds light on various strings and string operations in Python.
Chapter 4, Lists, gives the idea of one of the important collection types, called lists, available in Python and all the relevant operations that could be done on lists.
Chapter 5, Dictionary, covers another important collection type available in Python and deals with the basics of dictionary and the various operations on a dictionary.
Chapter 6, Control Statements and Loops, discusses about various control statements, such as if statement, and loops (for, while, and so on), which could be used to write a piece of code in Python.
Chapter 7, Function and Scope of Variable, gives you an idea about functions that could be user-defined or built in. The chapter talks about the basics of a function and various operations. Also, the chapter gives you an idea about the validity of a variable within the particular scope of the code block.
Chapter 8, Modules and Packages, discusses about various modules and packages that are available in Python and also how to create your own package and module.
Chapter 9, File Handling and Exceptions, is divided into two parts; the first part deals with different file handling operations and the second part deals with exception handling.
Chapter 10, Collections, gives you the primer for different types and subtypes of collections in Python and explains the basic operations that could be done on them.
Chapter 11, Class and Objects, finally gives you an idea about some object-oriented programming concepts that are available in Python.
For this book, you need to install Python 2.7x version on your machine, along with a simple text editor (Notepad or Notepad++). All the examples are meant to be run on the Python 2.7 version and will not work in Python 3.x versions.
This book is intended for people who have zero to some background in computer programming. It is also intended for people who want to have some refresher in Python programming.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The next step is to edit build.properties file."
A block of code is set as follows:
print "Name Marks Age"
print ( "%s %14.2f %11d" % ("John Doe", 80.67, 27))
print ( "%s %12.2f %11d" %("Bhaskar" ,76.901, 27))
print ( "%s %3.2f %11d" %("Mohit", 56.98, 25)) Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ brew install pythonNew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Once done, click on Activate."
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