this book would not have been possible without the wonderful and extremely professional staff at no starch press bill pollock invited me to write an introductory bookand deeply appreciate that original offer tyler ortman helped shape my thinking in the early stages of drafting liz chadwick' and leslie shen' initial feedback on each was invaluableand anne marie walker helped to clarify many parts of the book riley hoffman answered every question had about the process of assembling complete book and patiently turned my work into beautiful finished product ' like to thank kenneth lovethe technical reviewer for python crash course met kenneth at pycon one yearand his enthusiasm for the language and the python community has been constant source of professional inspiration ever since kenneth went beyond simple fact-checking and reviewed the book with the goal of helping beginning programmers develop solid understanding of the python language and programming in general that saidany inaccuracies that remain are completely my own ' like to thank my father for introducing me to programming at young age and for not being afraid that ' break his equipment ' like to thank my wifeerinfor supporting and encouraging me through the writing of this bookand ' like to thank my soneverwhose curiosity inspires me every single day