Python for Non-Programmers

If you've never programmed before, the tutorials on this page are recommended for you; they don't assume that you have previous experience.

If you have previous programming experience, the list of programmer-oriented tutorials on the ["BeginnersGuide/Programmers"] page may get you started more quickly, but the tutorials on this page may still be helpful.

• [http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld/ Learning to Program] An introduction to programming for those who have never programmed before, by Alan Gauld. It introduces several programming languages but has a strong emphasis on Python.

• [http://www.byteofpython.info/ A Byte of Python], by Swaroop C.H., is also an introductory text for people with no previous programming experience.

• [http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/idle_intro/index.html One Day of IDLE Toying] A very gentle introduction to the IDLE development environment that comes with Python. This tutorial by Danny Yoo has been translated into nine different languages.

• [http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCSpy/ How to Think Like a Computer Scientist] Allen Downey's open source textbook has a Python version, written with Jeff Elkner. It's also available in book form.

• [http://www.hetland.org/python/instant-hacking.php Instant Hacking] A minimal crash course by Magnus Lie Hetland that's an excellent starting point.

• Free Python video lectures are also available as a course titled ["Intro to programming with Python and Tkinter"], Unix users can view the video using mplayer once you have downloaded the files. Windows users will need to have a DivX player, available from http://www.divx.com/divx/windows/. (One user reports success viewing the videos on OS X 10.4 using the VLC player -- http://www.videolan.org/)

• [http://www.honors.montana.edu/~jjc/easytut/easytut/ A Non-Programmer's Tutorial for Python] by Josh Cogliati.

• [http://www.pentangle.net/python/handbook/ Handbook of the Physics Computing Course] Also available in various forms at the

  author's [http://www.pentangle.net/python/ Python in Education] page, this is a preliminary course handbook for 1st-year university students with no computing experience. This course material is still preliminary and assumes some high school-level maths. It does not cover object-oriented programming or graphical applications.

• [http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2002/10/17/biopython.html Beginning Python for Bioinformatics] by Patrick O'Brien. An introduction to Python aimed at biologists that introduces the PyCrust shell and Python's basic data types.

• Two courses from the Pasteur Institute are aimed at biologists but are useful to anyone wanting to learn Python. Both tutorials are quite extensive, covering data types, object-oriented programming, files, and even design patterns.

  • [http://www.pasteur.fr/formation/infobio/python/ Introduction to Programming using Python] is for people completely new to programming.

  • [http://www.pasteur.fr/recherche/unites/sis/formation/python/ Bioinformatics course in Python]

  focuses on preparing people with some programming background for using the

  [http://www.biopython.org Biopython] modules.

• [http://docs.python.org/tut/ Python Tutorial] This tutorial is part of Python's documentation set and is updated with each new release. It's not written with non-programmers in mind, but skimming through it will give you an idea of the language's flavor and style.

For Younger Students

• [http://www.livewires.org.uk/python/ LiveWires] A set of Python lessons used during 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2002

  children's summer camps in Britain by Richard Crook, Gareth McCaughan, Mark White, and Rhodri James. Aimed at children 12-15 years old.

• [http://gvr.sourceforge.net Guido van Robot] A teaching tool in which students write simple programs using a Python-like language to control a simulated robot. Field-tested at Yorktown High School, the project includes a lesson plan.