python basics covers expressionsthe most basic type of python instructionand how to use the python interactive shell software to experiment with code flow control explains how to make programs decide which instructions to execute so your code can intelligently respond to different conditions functions instructs you on how to define your own functions so that you can organize your code into more manageable chunks lists introduces the list data type and explains how to organize data dictionaries and structuring data introduces the dictionary data type and shows you more powerful ways to organize data manipulating strings covers working with text data (called strings in pythonpart iiautomating tasks pattern matching with regular expressions covers how python can manipulate strings and search for text patterns with regular expressions input validation explains how your program can verify the information user gives itensuring that the user' data arrives in format that won' cause errors in the rest of the program reading and writing files explains how your program can read the contents of text files and save information to files on your hard drive organizing files shows how python can copymoverenameand delete large numbers of files much faster than human user can also explains compressing and decompressing files debugging shows how to use python' various bugfinding and bug-fixing tools web scraping shows how to write programs that can automatically download web pages and parse them for information this is called web scraping working with excel spreadsheets covers programmatically manipulating excel spreadsheets so that you don' have to read them this is helpful when the number of documents you have to analyze is in the hundreds or thousands working with google sheets covers how to read and update google sheetsa popular web-based spreadsheet applicationusing python working with pdf and word documents covers programmatically reading word and pdf documents xxxii introduction