Аннотация

I believe that computer programming is a skill that is best learned through hands-on
experience. While it is valuable for you to read about programming in textbooks
and watch teachers create programs at the front of classrooms, it is even more
important for you to spend time-solving problems that allow you to put programming
concepts into practice. With this in mind, the majority of the pages in this
book are dedicated to exercises and their solutions while only a few pages are used
to briefly introduce the concepts needed to complete them.
This book contains 186 exercises that span a variety of academic disciplines and
everyday situations. They can be solved using only the material covered in most
introductory Python programming courses. Each exercise that you complete will
strengthen your understanding of the Python programming language and enhance
your ability to tackle subsequent programming challenges. I also hope that the
connections that these exercises make to other academic disciplines and everyday
life will maintain your interest as you complete them.
Solutions to approximately half of the exercises are provided in the second half
of this book. Most of the solutions include brief annotations that explain the
technique used to solve the problem or highlight a specific point of Python syntax.
You will find these annotations in shaded boxes, making it easy to distinguish them
from the solution itself.
I hope that you will take the time to compare each of your solutions with mine,
even when you arrive at your solution without encountering any problems. Performing
this comparison may reveal a flaw in your program, or help you become
more familiar with a technique that you could have used to solve the problem more
easily. In some cases, it could also reveal that you have discovered a faster or easier
way to solve the problem than I have. If you become stuck on an exercise, a quick
peek at my solution may help you work through your problem and continue to
make progress without requiring assistance from someone else. Finally, the solutions
that I have provided demonstrate good programming style, including appropriate
comments, meaningful variable names, and minimal use of magic numbers.
I encourage you to use good programming style when creating your solutions so
that they compute the correct result while also being clear, easy to understand, and
amenable to being updated in the future.