Fundamentals of Python: First Programs

This edition features a new chapter (Chapter Eleven) on data analysis and visualization. This chapter introduces tools and techniques for acquiring data sets, cleaning them and applying functions to them to determine relationships which can be visualized in plots, charts and graphs.

New secure or fail-safe programming sections have been added to most chapters. Most chapters include a discussion of ways to make a program detect and respond gracefully to disturbances in its runtime environment.

This edition features a new chapter (Chapter Seven) on design with recursion. This chapter incorporates and expands on material on recursive functions and higher-order functions from Chapter Six of the second edition.

Chapter One features updated coverage of the history of computing.

End-of-chapter review questions and programming exercises are updated. Most major sections of each chapter end with exercise questions that reinforce the reading by asking basic questions about the material in the section. Review question exercises, in multiple-choice format, allow students to re-visit the concepts presented in each chapter.

New debugging exercises in each chapter provide examples of challenging programming errors and give stuents experience in diagnosing and correcting them.

New case studies as well as several new or updated programming exercises present complete Python programs ranging from the simple to the substantial. To emphasize the importance and usefulness of the software development life cycle, case studies are discussed in the framework of a user request, followed by analysis, design, implementation and suggestions for testing, with well-defined tasks performed at each stage. Some case studies are extended in end-of-chapter programming exercises.

End-of-chapter programming exercises are mapped to the chapter learning objectives. Each chapter ends with a set of programming projects of varying difficulty. Each programming exercise is mapped to one or more relevant chapter learning objectives, and gives stduents the opportunity to design and implement a complete program that utilizes major concepts presented in that chapter.

Text revisions throughout have a focus on readability. Each chapter also begins with a set of learning objectives that describe the skills and concepts students will acquire from a careful reading of the chapter.