and software in generalare both challenging and rewarding enough to merit the effort implied by comprehensive books such as this here are few pointers on using this book for readers on both sides of the experience spectrumto experienced programmers you have an initial advantage and can move quickly through some earlier but you shouldn' skip the core ideasand may need to work at letting go of some baggage in general termsexposure to any programming or scripting before this book might be helpful because of the analogies it may provide on the other handi've also found that prior programming experience can be handicap due to expectations rooted in other languages (it' far too easy to spot the java or +programmers in classes by the first python code they write!using python well requires adopting its mindset by focusing on key core conceptsthis book is designed to help you learn to code python in python to true beginners you can learn python here tooas well as programming itselfbut you may need to work bit harderand may wish to supplement this text with gentler introductions if you don' consider yourself programmer alreadyyou will probably find this book useful toobut you'll want to be sure to proceed slowly and work through the examples and exercises along the way also keep in mind that this book will spend more time teaching python itself than programming basics if you find yourself lost herei encourage you to explore an introduction to programming in general before tackling this book python' website has links to many helpful resources for beginners formallythis book is designed to serve as first python text for newcomers of all kinds it may not be an ideal resource for someone who has never touched computer before (for instancewe're not going to spend any time exploring what computer is)but haven' made many assumptions about your programming background or education on the other handi won' insult readers by assuming they are "dummies,eitherwhatever that means--it' easy to do useful things in pythonand this book will show you how the text occasionally contrasts python with languages such as cc++javaand othersbut you can safely ignore these comparisons if you haven' used such languages in the past this book' structure to help orient youthis section provides quick rundown of the content and goals of the major parts of this book if you're anxious to get to ityou should feel free to skip xl preface