1. Basics

             Hello Programmer, this is your ultimate guide to learn the Python programming language! Here you'll learn enough Python to be able to understand the basic Python syntaxes and learn essential concepts around Python to finally help you write your own code effectively. I've carefully curated this guide in a top-down learning structure, starting with the very basics to more advanced concepts as we progress. This guide will certainly not make you a Python pro, but will introduce to much of its features. The goal was to prepare a guide to understand most of the essential syntaxes, features and tricks in a simple & comprehensive way to save the reader's time. Before we even begin, let me answer some questions.

What is this?

It's a handbook for a programmer who's already familiar with other languages such as C/C++/Java and wants to learn Python but fast. If this is your second book or you need a Python refresher, you're going to love this book.

What's not this?

This is not a traditional programming course/book, it's not a complete Python guide and might be structured somewhat differently. This book might not be right for a 'programming fresher', if you find it a little overwhelming at the beginning I suggest you to try more beginner friendly books like Byte of Python/Think Python and come back to this one to further fine tune your learning.

What you'll learn?

We'll begin with all the language basics, Data Types, Data Structures to other things such as Flow Control, Exception Handling, Functions, Classes, Objects and much more. Below is the roadmap to guide you what will be covered.

How to?

I'd suggest start with reading the chapters in the sequence they are arranged in (or jump around if you are curious about some topic) at your own pace. In a topic read the explanations first, then copy the code, run it and check the output. I've packed lots of information in the comments of code, so make sure to read them too. Also look for "Note" and "Notice" comments, they'll provide you re-checks from time to time.

As with learning anything it is very important to clear the fundamentals at the beginning itself, so let's do that first. In this first chapter, we'll go through some introductions, then cover some language basics. Let's begin.