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When I first learned Python nearly 25 years ago, I was immediatelystruck by how I could productively apply it to all sorts of messy workprojects. Fast-forward a decade and I found myself teaching others thesame fun. The result of that teaching is this course--A no-nonsensetreatment of Python that has been actively taught to more than 400in-person groups since 2007. Traders, systems admins, astronomers,tinkerers, and even a few hundred rocket scientists who used Python tohelp land a rover on Mars--they've all taken this course. Now, I'mpleased to make it available under a Creative Commons license. Enjoy!

GitHub Pages |GitHub Repo.

--David Beazley (https://dabeaz.com),@dabeaz

The material you see here is the heart of an instructor-led Pythontraining course used for corporate training and professionaldevelopment. It has been in continual development since 2007 andbattle tested in real-world classrooms. Usually, it's taughtin-person over the span of three or four days--requiring approximately25-35 hours of intense work. This includes the completion ofapproximately 130 hands-on coding exercises.

Students of this course are usually professional scientists,engineers, and programmers who already have experience in at least oneother programming language. No prior knowledge of Python is required,but knowledge of common programming topics is assumed. Mostparticipants find the course challenging--even if they've already beendoing a bit of Python programming.

The goal of this course is to cover foundational aspects of Pythonprogramming with an emphasis on script writing, data manipulation, andprogram organization. By the end of this course, students should beable to start writing useful Python programs on their own or be ableto understand and modify Python code written by theircoworkers.

To complete this course, you need nothing more than a basicinstallation of Python 3.6 or newer and time to work on it.

This is not a course for absolute beginners on how to program acomputer. It is assumed that you already have programming experiencein some other programming language or Python itself.

This is not a course on web development. That's a differentcircus. However, if you stick around for this circus, you'll still seesome interesting acts--just nothing involving animals.

This is not a course for software engineers on how to write ormaintain a one-million line Python application. I don't write programslike that, nor do most companies who use Python, and neither shouldyou. Delete something already!

Ok, ok. Point your browserHERE!

Want to discuss the course? You can join the conversation onGitter. I can'tpromise an individual response, but perhaps others can jump in to help.

Llorenç Muntaner was instrumental in converting the course content fromApple Keynote to the online structure that you see here.

Various instructors have presented this course at one time or anotherover the last 12 years. This includes (in alphabetical order): NedBatchelder, Juan Pablo Claude, Mark Fenner, Michael Foord, MattHarrison, Raymond Hettinger, Daniel Klein, Travis Oliphant, JamesPowell, Michael Selik, Hugo Shi, Ian Stokes-Rees, Yarko Tymciurak,Bryan Van de ven, Peter Wang, and Mark Wiebe.

I'd also like to thank the thousands of students who have taken thiscourse and contributed to its success with their feedback anddiscussion.

No. This course is about you writing Python code, not watching someone else.

Practical Python Programming is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Yes, as long as appropriate attribution is given.

Yes, as long as such works carry the same license terms and provide attribution.

Yes, that would be awesome. Send me a link when you're done.

Yes, go for it! You'll probably learn a lot of Python doing that.

There is only so much material that you can cover in 3-4 days. Ifit wasn't covered, it was probably because it was once covered and itcaused everyone's head to explode or there was never enough time tocover it in the first place. Also, this is a course, not a Pythonreference manual.

Bug reports are appreciated and may be filed through theissue tracker.Pull requests are not accepted except by invitation. Please file an issue first.