my goal here is for something that is partly tutorial and partly reference book like how tutorials get you up and running quicklybut they can often be little wordy and disorganized reference books contain lot of good informationbut they are often too terseand they don' often give you sense of what is important my aim here is for something in the spirit of tutorial but still useful as reference summarize information in tables and give lot of short example programs also like to jump right into things and fill in background information as gorather than covering the background material first this book started out as about pages of notes for students in my introductory programming class at mount st mary' university most of these students have no prior programming experienceand that has affected my approach leave out lot of technical details and sometimes oversimplify things some of these details are filled in later in the bookthough other details are never filled in but this book is not designed to cover everythingand recommend reading other books and the python documentation to fill in the gaps the style of programming in this book is geared towards the kinds of programming things like to do--short programsoften of mathematical naturesmall utilities to make my life easierand small computer games in factthe things cover in the book are the things that have found most useful or interesting in my programming experienceand this book serves partly to document those things for myself this book is not designed as thorough preparation for career in software engineering interested readers should progress from this book to book that has more on computer science and the design and organization of large programs in terms of structuring course around this book or learning on your ownthe basis is most of part the first four are critically important is usefulbut not all of it is critical (stringsshould be done before (lists contains some more advanced list topics much of this can be skippedthough it is all interesting and useful in particularthat covers list comprehensionswhich use extensively later in the book while you can get away without using list comprehensionsthey provide an elegant and efficient way of doing things (while loopsis important contains bunch of miscellaneous topicsall of which are usefulbut many can be skipped if need be the final four of part are about dictionariestext filesfunctionsand object-oriented programming part ii is about graphicsmostly gui programming with tkinter you can very quickly write some nice programs using tkinter for instancesection presents -line working (though not ix