Welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for the second edition of Python Workout. While I hope that you’ll learn a great deal from this book, it won’t be from long descriptions of how Python works. Rather, it’ll be from solving numerous problems, each of which will nudge you just a bit more in the direction of more experience, greater fluency, and deeper understanding of Python.

I’ve long been a big believer in the power of practice to improve your Python — or anything else, for that matter. Solving a large number and variety of problems over an extended period of time will change the way you approach and solve problems. You’ll start to see patterns in the problem statements, and will recognize which techniques would be most appropriate to apply.

And yes, you’ll make mistakes. And you’ll sometimes struggle to understand what to do. But that’s part of the learning process; without frustration and failure, you won’t learn. After you’ve solved an exercise, or tried to do so, you can go through my detailed solution and understand what I was thinking, and what I hoped you would get out of that particular problem.

Since Python Workout was first published several years ago, the Python language has gone through a number of changes. I’ve updated the book to reflect those changes, along with fixing a number of errors in the first edition. I’ve also cleaned up and improved a number of the exercises, and have added a number of diagrams that help to make things clearer.