577 pages.
You’ll need to read this book when you have the following three things happening at the same time:
You have a problem to solve that involves data and processing.
You’ve found that the common desktop tools (word processors, spread sheets, databases, organizers, graphics) won’t really help. You’ve found that they require too much manual pointing and clicking, or they don’t do the right kinds of processing on your data.
You’re ready to invest some of your own time to learn how to write customized software that will solve your problem.
You’ll want to read this book if you are tinkerer who likes to know how things really work. For many people, a computer is just an appliance. You may not find this satisfactory, and you want to know more. People who tinker with computers are called hackers, and you are about to join their ranks.
Python is what you’ve been looking for. It is an easy-to-use tool that can do any kind of processing on any kind of data. Seriously: any processing, any data. Programming is the term for setting up a computer to do the processing you define on your data. Once you learn the Python language, you can solve your data processing problem.
Our objective is to get you, a non-programming newbie, up and running. When you’re done with this book, you’ll be ready to move on to a more advanced Python book. For example, a book about the Python libraries. You can use these libraries can help you build high-quality software with a minimum of work.
