Learning Python

If you're new to Python, you're in for a surprise - no powerful computer language should be so easy to learn...or so much fun! There are numerous sites which offer graded tutorials. The following are available for free download and are a good place to start.

• How to think like a computer scientist is a reasonably gentle introduction. It is available both for reading online and in a downloadable format. If you're familiar with another programming language.
  
  Download first edition from : http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkCSpy/
  
  The 2nd Edition is available on-line at http://openbookproject.net/thinkCSpy/index.html
  
  
• Dive into python moves a bit faster and deals with things in more depth.
  
  Download from : http://www.diveintopython.org/
  

If you're using a Macintosh OSX machine, there is a Python interpreter installed already, so you can use this experiment with Python directly, before the need to download anything. Later you can download the Python usd for SoniPy, but to get started, you can use the one that there already:
* Open a terminal window by double-clicking on Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app.
* Then type 'python' when the prompt appears.
(The unix prompt is the "%" in the example, below).
You shoould see something like this:

For more advanced users, there is a full tutorial by the author of Python, Guido van Rossum, who is still actively involved it its development.

Quick Reference Guides

New Mexico Tech has useful Quick Reference Guides in html and as PDFs  for Python and for PIL (the Python Image Library)

Downloads summary

• How to think like a computer scientist http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkCSpy/
• Dive into python  http://www.diveintopython.org/
• Guido van Rossum's Python tutorial  http://docs.python.org/tut/
• Quick Reference guides http://infohost.nmt.edu/tcc/help/pubs/lang.html