Working with Python – Introductory Level

Python is one of the world’s most popular programming languages, and with good reason: it is extremely flexible, easy to learn, and runs on a wide variety of devices and platforms. In fact, Python recently moved to first place in the TIOBE programming community index, which is a remarkable achievement.

This course is an introduction to Python, version 3.10. Unlike many introductory courses, we will not spend hours surveying the basics of the language; personally, I see no point in doing that, since there are already many, many free resources online that do precisely that. Instead, we’ll learn the language in the way that I have long preferred: we’ll actually build something.

The bulk of this course will be focused on building a simple text adventure game, where the player explores a labyrinth, encounters monsters, engages in combat, finds items, and that sort of thing. It’s a bit of a throwback to the early days of computer games, but the important thing here is not the quality of the game that we’ll build, but rather that we’ll cover all of the things you need to get started programming in Python, including:

Python’s primitive data types: integer, float, string, and boolean

Python’s aggregate data types: tuple, set, dictionary and list