Before You Start Learning Python

What Is Programming?

Television shows and films often show programmers furiously typing cryptic streams of 1s and 0s on glowing screens, but modern programming isn’t that mysterious. Programming is simply the act of instructions for the computer to perform. These instructions might crunch some numbers, modify text, look up information in files. All programs use basic instructions as building blocks like, “Do this then do that.” “If this condition is true, perform this action; otherwise, do that action.” “Do this action that number of times.” “Keep doing that until this condition is true.”

What Is Python?

Python refers to the Python programming language and the

Python interpreter software that reads source code and per-forms its instructions. The Python interpreter is free to download from http://python.org/. and there are versions for Linux, OS X, and Windows.

Programmers Don’t Need to Know Much Math

The most common anxiety I hear about learning to program is that people think it requires a lot of math. Actually, most programming doesn’t require math beyond basic arithmetic. In fact, being good at programming isn’t that different from being good at solving Sudoku puzzles.