Non-Programmer's Tutorial for Python 2.6/Front matter

Python 3 notice: it's not recommended to learn Python 2 since it has been deprecated and replaced by Python 3. If you're new to Python, start learning Python 3. There's a Python 3 version of this Wikibook.

All example Python source code in this tutorial is granted to the public domain. Therefore, you may modify it and relicense it under any license you please. Since you are expected to learn programming, the GNU Free Documentation License would require you to keep all programs that are derived from the source code in this tutorial under that license. Since the python source code is granted to the public domain, that requirement is waived.

This tutorial was originally written in LaTeX and was available at: http://www.honors.montana.edu/~jjc/easytut/. It was moved here because the other server is going away and it was being read at least ten times a day. This document is available as LaTeX, HTML, PDF, and Postscript. Go to http://jjc.freeshell.org/easytut/ (Also could try http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.honors.montana.edu/~jjc/easytut/ or http://www.geocities.com/jrincayc/easytut.tar.gz ) to see all these forms. There are also versions of this in Korean, Spanish, Italian and Greek in the tar file.

The Non-Programmers' Tutorial For Python is a tutorial designed to be an introduction to the Python programming language. This guide is for someone with no programming experience.

If you have programmed in other languages I recommend using Python Tutorial for Programmers written by Guido van Rossum.

If you have any questions or comments please use the discussion pages or see ../Authors for author contact information. I welcome questions and comments about this tutorial. I will try to answer any questions you have as best I can.

Thanks go to James A. Brown for writing most of the Windows install info. Thanks also to Elizabeth Cogliati for complaining enough : about the original tutorial (that is almost unusable for a non-programmer), for proofreading, and for many ideas and comments on it. Thanks to Joe Oppegaard for writing almost all the exercises. Thanks to everyone I have missed.

Other resources
See also chapter The End for some more comments.
 * Python Home Page
 * Python Documentation
 * Python Tutorial for Programmers
 * LaTeX, PDF, and Postscript, and Zip versions