this large probably merits brief roadmap up front by designeach part covers major functional area of the languageand each part is composed of focusing on specific topic or aspect of the part' area in additioneach ends with quizzes and their answersand each part ends with larger exerciseswhose solutions show up in appendix practice mattersi strongly recommend that readers work through the quizzes and exercises in this bookand work along with its examples in general if you can in programmingthere' no substitute for practicing what you've read whether you do it with this book or project of your ownactual coding is crucial if you want the ideas presented here to stick overallthis book' presentation is bottom-up because python is too the examples and topics grow more challenging as we move along for instancepython' classes are largely just packages of functions that process built-in types once you've mastered built-in types and functionsclasses become relatively minor intellectual leap because each part builds on those preceding it this waymost readers will find linear reading makes the most sense here' preview of the book' main parts you'll find along the waypart we begin with general overview of python that answers commonly asked initial questions--why people use the languagewhat it' useful forand so on the first introduces the major ideas underlying the technology to give you some background context the rest of this part moves on to explore the ways that both python and programmers run programs the main goal here is to give you just enough information to be able to follow along with later examples and exercises part ii nextwe begin our tour of the python languagestudying python' major built-in object types and what you can do with them in depthnumberslistsdictionariesand so on you can get lot done with these tools aloneand they are at the heart of every python script this is the most substantial part of the book because we lay groundwork here for later we'll also explore dynamic typing and its references--keys to using python well--in this part part iii the next part moves on to introduce python' statements--the code you type to create and process objects in python it also presents python' general syntax model although this part focuses on syntaxit also introduces some related tools (such as the pydoc system)takes first look at iteration conceptsand explores coding alternatives preface xli