Practical Programming

Classroom-tested by generations of students, this new edition of the popular intro to programming book is for anyone who wants to understand computer science. Learn about design, algorithms, testing, and debugging. Discover the fundamentals of programming with Python: a language that’s used across industries and platforms. Write programs to solve real-world problems, and come away with everything you need to produce quality code. This edition has been updated to use the new language features in Python 3.14.

No programming experience required! Incremental examples show you the steps and missteps that happen while developing programs, so you know what to expect when you tackle a problem on your own. Inspired by “How to Design Programs” (HtDP), discover a five-step recipe for designing functions, which helps you learn the concepts—and becomes an integral part of writing programs.

In this detailed introduction to Python and to computer programming, find out exactly what happens when your programs are executed. Work with numbers, text, sequences, and files using real-world examples. Create and use your own data types. Make your programs robust and reliable; develop an idiomatic programming style; download data from the web automatically. As you use the fundamental programming tools in this book, you’ll see how to document and organize your code so that you and other programmers can more easily read and understand it. This new edition takes advantage of Python 3.14’s new features, including f-strings, the walrus operator, and richer type annotations on parameters, return types, and variable declarations.

Most importantly, you’ll learn how to think like a professional programmer.