What You’ll See

In this book, we’ll do the following:

• We’ll show you how to develop and use programs that solve real-world problems. Most of the examples will come from science and engineering, but the ideas can be applied to any domain.

• We’ll start by teaching you the core features of Python. These features are included in most modern programming languages, so you can use what you learn no matter what you work on next.

• We’ll also teach you how to think methodically about programming. In particular, we will show you how to break complex problems into simple ones and how to combine the solutions to those simpler problems to create complete applications.

• Finally, we’ll introduce some tools that will help make your programming more productive, as well as some others that will help your applications cope with larger problems.