Introduction to Python

Welcome! This book aims to take you from novice programmer to competent, beginner Python programmer! It will introduce you to Python and Jupyter notebooks. We’ll cover the basics of programming in Python, introducing variables, operators and conditionals. With that under your belt, you’ll move on to master more complex variable types of variables followed by functions. The final Python concept we’ll introduce are Classes. However, the content in this book moves beyond introducing the various pieces you’ll need to program in Python. We spend the final portion of the book talking about how you’ll go from writing functional code to writing good code. We’ll discuss documentation, code style, and code testing before touching on command line at the end. Happy to be with you here on your journey as you learn to program in Python!

COGS 18

It was initially developed for students in COGS 18 Introduction to Python at UC San Diego, an intro programming course designed particularly for non-computer science majors. We really hope it works well for our students, but if you’re not in this class and this site helps you, that’s great too!

Textbook Feedback

This book has recently been improved from its prior state, but we’re still actively working on it. We’d love your feedback to help us in this process. All feedback welcome!