Python Tutorial

Release 3.12.2

Guido van Rossum and the Python development team

February 22, 2024

Python Software Foundation

Email: [email protected]
CONTENTS

1 Whetting Your Appetite 3

2 Using the Python Interpreter 5

2.1 Invoking the Interpreter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.1.1 Argument Passing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.1.2 Interactive Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.2 The Interpreter and Its Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.2.1 Source Code Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

3 An Informal Introduction to Python 9

3.1 Using Python as a Calculator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.1.1 Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.1.2 Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.1.3 Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3.2 First Steps Towards Programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

4 More Control Flow Tools 19

4.1 if Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
4.2 for Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
4.3 The range() Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
4.4 break and continue Statements, and else Clauses on Loops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4.5 pass Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
4.6 match Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
4.7 Defining Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
4.8 More on Defining Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
4.8.1 Default Argument Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
4.8.2 Keyword Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
4.8.3 Special parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
4.8.4 Arbitrary Argument Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
4.8.5 Unpacking Argument Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4.8.6 Lambda Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4.8.7 Documentation Strings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
4.8.8 Function Annotations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
4.9 Intermezzo: Coding Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

5 Data Structures 37
5.1 More on Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
5.1.1 Using Lists as Stacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
5.1.2 Using Lists as Queues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
5.1.3 List Comprehensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

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5.1.4 Nested List Comprehensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
5.2 The del statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
5.3 Tuples and Sequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
5.4 Sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
5.5 Dictionaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
5.6 Looping Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
5.7 More on Conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
5.8 Comparing Sequences and Other Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

6 Modules 49
6.1 More on Modules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
6.1.1 Executing modules as scripts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
6.1.2 The Module Search Path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
6.1.3 “Compiled” Python files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
6.2 Standard Modules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
6.3 The dir() Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
6.4 Packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
6.4.1 Importing * From a Package . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
6.4.2 Intra-package References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
6.4.3 Packages in Multiple Directories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

7 Input and Output 59

7.1 Fancier Output Formatting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
7.1.1 Formatted String Literals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
7.1.2 The String format() Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
7.1.3 Manual String Formatting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
7.1.4 Old string formatting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
7.2 Reading and Writing Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
7.2.1 Methods of File Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
7.2.2 Saving structured data with json . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

8 Errors and Exceptions 67

8.1 Syntax Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
8.2 Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
8.3 Handling Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
8.4 Raising Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
8.5 Exception Chaining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
8.6 User-defined Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
8.7 Defining Clean-up Actions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
8.8 Predefined Clean-up Actions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
8.9 Raising and Handling Multiple Unrelated Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
8.10 Enriching Exceptions with Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

9 Classes 79
9.1 A Word About Names and Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
9.2 Python Scopes and Namespaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
9.2.1 Scopes and Namespaces Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
9.3 A First Look at Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
9.3.1 Class Definition Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
9.3.2 Class Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
9.3.3 Instance Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
9.3.4 Method Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
9.3.5 Class and Instance Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
9.4 Random Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
9.5 Inheritance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

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9.5.1 Multiple Inheritance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
9.6 Private Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
9.7 Odds and Ends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
9.8 Iterators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
9.9 Generators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
9.10 Generator Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

10 Brief Tour of the Standard Library 93

10.1 Operating System Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
10.2 File Wildcards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
10.3 Command Line Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
10.4 Error Output Redirection and Program Termination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
10.5 String Pattern Matching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
10.6 Mathematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
10.7 Internet Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
10.8 Dates and Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
10.9 Data Compression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
10.10 Performance Measurement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
10.11 Quality Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
10.12 Batteries Included . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

11 Brief Tour of the Standard Library — Part II 99

11.1 Output Formatting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
11.2 Templating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
11.3 Working with Binary Data Record Layouts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
11.4 Multi-threading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
11.5 Logging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
11.6 Weak References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
11.7 Tools for Working with Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
11.8 Decimal Floating Point Arithmetic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

12 Virtual Environments and Packages 107

12.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
12.2 Creating Virtual Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
12.3 Managing Packages with pip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

13 What Now? 111

14 Interactive Input Editing and History Substitution 113

14.1 Tab Completion and History Editing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
14.2 Alternatives to the Interactive Interpreter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

15 Floating Point Arithmetic: Issues and Limitations 115

15.1 Representation Error . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

16 Appendix 121
16.1 Interactive Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
16.1.1 Error Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
16.1.2 Executable Python Scripts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
16.1.3 The Interactive Startup File . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
16.1.4 The Customization Modules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122

A Glossary 123

B About these documents 139

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B.1 Contributors to the Python Documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

C History and License 141

C.1 History of the software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
C.2 Terms and conditions for accessing or otherwise using Python . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
C.2.1 PSF LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR PYTHON 3.12.2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
C.2.2 BEOPEN.COM LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR PYTHON 2.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
C.2.3 CNRI LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR PYTHON 1.6.1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
C.2.4 CWI LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR PYTHON 0.9.0 THROUGH 1.2 . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
C.2.5 ZERO-CLAUSE BSD LICENSE FOR CODE IN THE PYTHON 3.12.2 DOCUMENTATION145
C.3 Licenses and Acknowledgements for Incorporated Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
C.3.1 Mersenne Twister . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
C.3.2 Sockets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
C.3.3 Asynchronous socket services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
C.3.4 Cookie management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
C.3.5 Execution tracing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
C.3.6 UUencode and UUdecode functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
C.3.7 XML Remote Procedure Calls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
C.3.8 test_epoll . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
C.3.9 Select kqueue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
C.3.10 SipHash24 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
C.3.11 strtod and dtoa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
C.3.12 OpenSSL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
C.3.13 expat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
C.3.14 libffi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
C.3.15 zlib . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
C.3.16 cfuhash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
C.3.17 libmpdec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
C.3.18 W3C C14N test suite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
C.3.19 Audioop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
C.3.20 asyncio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

D Copyright 161

Index 163

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Python Tutorial, Release 3.12.2

Python is an easy to learn, powerful programming language. It has efficient high-level data structures and a simple
but effective approach to object-oriented programming. Python’s elegant syntax and dynamic typing, together with its
interpreted nature, make it an ideal language for scripting and rapid application development in many areas on most
platforms.
The Python interpreter and the extensive standard library are freely available in source or binary form for all major
platforms from the Python web site, https://www.python.org/, and may be freely distributed. The same site also contains
distributions of and pointers to many free third party Python modules, programs and tools, and additional documentation.
The Python interpreter is easily extended with new functions and data types implemented in C or C++ (or other languages
callable from C). Python is also suitable as an extension language for customizable applications.
This tutorial introduces the reader informally to the basic concepts and features of the Python language and system. It
helps to have a Python interpreter handy for hands-on experience, but all examples are self-contained, so the tutorial can
be read off-line as well.
For a description of standard objects and modules, see library-index. reference-index gives a more formal definition of the
language. To write extensions in C or C++, read extending-index and c-api-index. There are also several books covering
Python in depth.
This tutorial does not attempt to be comprehensive and cover every single feature, or even every commonly used feature.
Instead, it introduces many of Python’s most noteworthy features, and will give you a good idea of the language’s flavor
and style. After reading it, you will be able to read and write Python modules and programs, and you will be ready to
learn more about the various Python library modules described in library-index.
The Glossary is also worth going through.

CONTENTS 1
Python Tutorial, Release 3.12.2

2 CONTENTS
CHAPTER

ONE

WHETTING YOUR APPETITE

If you do much work on computers, eventually you find that there’s some task you’d like to automate. For example, you
may wish to perform a search-and-replace over a large number of text files, or rename and rearrange a bunch of photo
files in a complicated way. Perhaps you’d like to write a small custom database, or a specialized GUI application, or a
simple game.
If you’re a professional software developer, you may have to work with several C/C++/Java libraries but find the usual
write/compile/test/re-compile cycle is too slow. Perhaps you’re writing a test suite for such a library and find writing the
testing code a tedious task. Or maybe you’ve written a program that could use an extension language, and you don’t want
to design and implement a whole new language for your application.
Python is just the language for you.
You could write a Unix shell script or Windows batch files for some of these tasks, but shell scripts are best at moving
around files and changing text data, not well-suited for GUI applications or games. You could write a C/C++/Java program,
but it can take a lot of development time to get even a first-draft program. Python is simpler to use, available on Windows,
macOS, and Unix operating systems, and will help you get the job done more quickly.
Python is simple to use, but it is a real programming language, offering much more structure and support for large programs
than shell scripts or batch files can offer. On the other hand, Python also offers much more error checking than C, and,
being a very-high-level language, it has high-level data types built in, such as flexible arrays and dictionaries. Because of
its more general data types Python is applicable to a much larger problem domain than Awk or even Perl, yet many things
are at least as easy in Python as in those languages.
Python allows you to split your program into modules that can be reused in other Python programs. It comes with a
large collection of standard modules that you can use as the basis of your programs — or as examples to start learning
to program in Python. Some of these modules provide things like file I/O, system calls, sockets, and even interfaces to
graphical user interface toolkits like Tk.
Python is an interpreted language, which can save you considerable time during program development because no compi-
lation and linking is necessary. The interpreter can be used interactively, which makes it easy to experiment with features
of the language, to write throw-away programs, or to test functions during bottom-up program development. It is also a
handy desk calculator.
Python enables programs to be written compactly and readably. Programs written in Python are typically much shorter
than equivalent C, C++, or Java programs, for several reasons:
• the high-level data types allow you to express complex operations in a single statement;
• statement grouping is done by indentation instead of beginning and ending brackets;
• no variable or argument declarations are necessary.
Python is extensible: if you know how to program in C it is easy to add a new built-in function or module to the interpreter,
either to perform critical operations at maximum speed, or to link Python programs to libraries that may only be available
in binary form (such as a vendor-specific graphics library). Once you are really hooked, you can link the Python interpreter
into an application written in C and use it as an extension or command language for that application.

3
Python Tutorial, Release 3.12.2

By the way, the language is named after the BBC show “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and has nothing to do with reptiles.
Making references to Monty Python skits in documentation is not only allowed, it is encouraged!
Now that you are all excited about Python, you’ll want to examine it in some more detail. Since the best way to learn a
language is to use it, the tutorial invites you to play with the Python interpreter as you read.
In the next chapter, the mechanics of using the interpreter are explained. This is rather mundane information, but essential
for trying out the examples shown later.
The rest of the tutorial introduces various features of the Python language and system through examples, beginning
with simple expressions, statements and data types, through functions and modules, and finally touching upon advanced
concepts like exceptions and user-defined classes.

4 Chapter 1. Whetting Your Appetite