Preface xvii

Acknowledgments xx

Exercise 0: The Setup 2

macOS 2

Windows 3

Linux 4

Finding Things on the Internet 5

Warnings for Beginners 6

Alternative Text Editors 6

Exercise 1: A Good First Program 8

What You Should See 10

Study Drills 12

Common Student Questions 12

Exercise 2: Comments and Pound Characters 14

What You Should See 14

Study Drills 14

Common Student Questions 15

Exercise 3: Numbers and Math 16

What You Should See 17

Study Drills 17

Common Student Questions 17

Exercise 4: Variables and Names 20

What You Should See 21

Study Drills 21

Common Student Questions 21

Exercise 5: More Variables and Printing 24

What You Should See 24

Study Drills 25

Common Student Questions 25

Exercise 6: Strings and Text 26

What You Should See 27

Study Drills 27

Break It 27

Common Student Questions 27

Exercise 7: More Printing 28

What You Should See 28

Study Drills 29

Break It 29

Common Student Questions 29

Exercise 8: Printing, Printing 30

What You Should See 30

Study Drills 31

Common Student Questions 31

Exercise 9: Printing, Printing, Printing 32

What You Should See 32

Study Drills 33

Common Student Questions 33

Exercise 10: What Was That? 34

What You Should See 35

Escape Sequences 35

Study Drills 36

Common Student Questions 36

Exercise 11: Asking Questions 38

What You Should See 38

Study Drills 39

Common Student Questions 39

Exercise 12: Prompting People 40

What You Should See 40

Study Drills 40

Common Student Questions 41

Exercise 13: Parameters, Unpacking, Variables 42

Hold Up! Features Have Another Name 42

What You Should See 43

Study Drills 44

Common Student Questions 44

Exercise 14: Prompting and Passing 46

What You Should See 46

Study Drills 47

Common Student Questions 47

Exercise 15: Reading Files 48

What You Should See 49

Study Drills 49

Common Student Questions 50

Exercise 16: Reading and Writing Files 52

What You Should See 53

Study Drills 53

Common Student Questions 54

Exercise 17: More Files 56

What You Should See 56

Study Drills 57

Common Student Questions 57

Exercise 18: Names, Variables, Code, Functions 60

What You Should See 61

Study Drills 62

Common Student Questions 62

Exercise 19: Functions and Variables 64

What You Should See 65

Study Drills 65

Common Student Questions 65

Exercise 20: Functions and Files 68

What You Should See 69

Study Drills 69

Common Student Questions 69

Exercise 21: Functions Can Return Something 72

What You Should See 73

Study Drills 73

Common Student Questions 74

Exercise 22: What Do You Know So Far? 76

What You Are Learning 76

Exercise 23: Strings, Bytes, and Character Encodings 78

Initial Research 78

Switches, Conventions, and Encodings 80

Disecting the Output 82

Disecting the Code 82

Encodings Deep Dive 84

Breaking It 85

Exercise 24: More Practice 86

What You Should See 87

Study Drills 87

Common Student Questions 87

Exercise 25: Even More Practice 90

What You Should See 91

Study Drills 92