front matter
foreword
I read the first edition of The Quick Python Book by Daryl Harms and Kenneth McDonald in late 1999. At the time there were only a handful of books about Python, and I believe I had them all. The Quick Python Book was the best book-length Python tutorial in the market. It offered a gentle learning curve and lots of practical advice, and it went beyond small snippets to discuss how to organize complete Python modules and programs.
All the qualities I mentioned remain, enhanced by new examples and insights by Naomi Ceder, who took over as the main author in the second edition.
The most important quality of The Quick Python Book has always been the practical context around the technical details. The labs at the end of the chapters and the chapter-length case study are about the creation and evolution of complete, useful programs.
In this fourth edition, Naomi complemented coverage of new Python features with two major changes. The first is using interactive notebooks on Google’s Colaboratory. That allows readers to jump right into coding and experimenting without installing anything on their computers. It also helps them get comfortable with the most popular coding environment for data science and AI: Jupyter notebooks.