H a n d s o n, p r o j e c t b a s e d

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
This book would not have been possible without the wonderful and 
extremely professional staff at No Starch Press. Bill Pollock invited me to 
write an introductory book, and I deeply appreciate that original offer. 
Tyler Ortman helped shape my thinking in the early stages of drafting. 
Liz Chadwick’s and Leslie Shen’s initial feedback on each chapter was 
invaluable, and Anne Marie Walker helped to clarify many parts of the 
book. Riley Hoffman answered every question I had about the process of 
assembling a complete book and patiently turned my work into a beautiful 
finished product.
I’d like to thank Kenneth Love, the technical reviewer for Python Crash 
Course. I met Kenneth at PyCon one year, and his enthusiasm for the lan-
guage and the Python community has been a constant source of profes-
sional inspiration ever since. Kenneth went beyond simple fact-checking 
and reviewed the book with the goal of helping beginning programmers 
develop a solid understanding of the Python language and programming 
in general. That said, any inaccuracies that remain are completely my own.
I’d like to thank my father for introducing me to programming at a 
young age and for not being afraid that I’d break his equipment. I’d like 
to thank my wife, Erin, for supporting and encouraging me through the 
writing of this book, and I’d like to thank my son, Ever, whose curiosity 
inspires me every single day.

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I n t r o d u c t I o n
Every programmer has a story about how 
they learned to write their first program. 
I started programming as a child when 
my father was working for Digital Equipment 
Corporation, one of the pioneering companies of the 
modern computing era. I wrote my first program 
on a kit computer that my dad had assembled in our basement. The com-
puter consisted of nothing more than a bare motherboard connected to a 
keyboard without a case, and its monitor was a bare cathode ray tube. My 
initial program was a simple number guessing game, which looked some-
thing like this:
I'm thinking of a number! Try to guess the number I'm thinking of: 25
Too low! Guess again: 50
Too high! Guess again: 42
That's it! Would you like to play again? (yes/no) no
Thanks for playing!

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xxxiv
Introduction
I’ll always remember how satisfied I felt watching my family play a game 
that I created and that worked as I intended it to. 
That early experience had a lasting impact. There is real satisfaction 
in building something with a purpose, something that solves a problem. 
The software I write now meets a more significant need than my childhood 
efforts, but the sense of satisfaction I get from creating a program that 
works is still largely the same.