Getting Started with Python

This is the doorway. Before you can make a notebook do anything useful, two comfortable habits have to form: pressing run and trusting what comes back, and recognising the handful of forms your material takes once it is inside the machine — a word count is a number, a glossary entry is text, a term list is a list. Nothing here asks you to invent code; you mostly run it, read it, and change one line to see what happens.

The two halves build on each other. The first — running Python and notebooks — makes the screen itself familiar: cells, output, errors, the small graded exercises, the mysterious import line at the top of examples. The second — data and type basics — gives you the vocabulary of the material itself, so that by the end nothing on a beginner's screen is unnamed.