"The Coder's Apprentice" is a course book, written by Pieter Spronck, that is aimed at teaching Python 3 to students and teenagers who are completely new to programming. Contrary to many of the other books that teach Python programming, this book assumes no previous knowledge of programming on the part of the students, and contains numerous exercises that allow students to train their programming skills.
Downloads
The book is freely available in PDF format.
Note: The book is presented in PDF format. It is not possible to have code in a PDF file that you can safely copy from there to an editor, without messing up spaces (which are rather important in Python code). Code that you want to use, you should either type in manually, or you can use the code listings which I have made available for most of the code in the book. You can download those below too.
The tablet version of the book has the same text, but smaller pages with very small margins, and no empty pages. Page numbers differ from those in the book, but Contents and Index have been updated accordingly. I realize that an ePub version of the book would be preferred, but it is going to take a while before I can get to creating something like that.
I wrote a short "companion book" for the Python book, on the topic of computational thinking. You can download this companion book below as well. At the moment it is only available in English, and only in a regular version. I will probably extend this book in the near future and also make a tablet version and a Dutch version.
- The Coder's Apprentice (PDF; current version: 1.1.0)
- Tablet version of The Coder's Apprentice (PDF; optimized for reading on tablets)
- Listings, library code, exercise templates, and test files
- Answers to the exercises
- Computational Thinking with Python (PDF; current version: 1.0.0)
A Dutch version of the book is also available.
Contact information
Suggestions and corrections to the book can be sent to pythonbook@spronck.net.