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how to use this book

Read Me

This is a learning experience, not a reference book. We deliberately stripped out everything
that might get in the way of learning whatever it is we’re working on at that point in the
book. And the first time through, you need to begin at the beginning, because the book
makes assumptions about what you’ve already seen and learned.

This book is designed to get you up to speed with Python as
quickly as possible.
As you need to know stuff, we teach it. So you won’t find long lists of technical material, no
tables of Python’s operators, not its operator precedence rules. We don’t cover everything,
but we’ve worked really hard to cover the essential material as well as we can, so that you
can get Python into your brain quickly and have it stay there. The only assumption we make
is that you already know how to program in some other programming language.

This book targets Python 3
We use Release 3 of the Python programming language in this book, and we cover how to
get and install Python 3 in the first chapter. That said, we don’t completely ignore Release
2, as you’ll discover in Chapters 8 through 11. But trust us, by then you’ll be so happy using
Python, you won’t notice that the technologies you’re programming are running Python 2.

We put Python to work for you right away.
We get you doing useful stuff in Chapter 1 and build from there. There’s no hanging
around, because we want you to be productive with Python right away.

The activities are NOT optional.
The exercises and activities are not add-ons; they’re part of the core content of the book.
Some of them are to help with memory, some are for understanding, and some will help
you apply what you’ve learned. Don’t skip the exercises.

The redundancy is intentional and important.

One distinct difference in a Head First book is that we want you to really get it. And we
want you to finish the book remembering what you’ve learned. Most reference books don’t
have retention and recall as a goal, but this book is about learning, so you’ll see some of the
same concepts come up more than once.

xxx intro