What's this?

This is intended to be a collection of exercises, sample programs, and links to help programmers who know Java, C, C++, or some some similar language get started programming in Python.

Setting up

If you don't have Python installed already, try these brief installation instructions.

Sample programs

Read and experiment with these programs to learn some of the basics.

The basics

basics.py
Arithmetic, strings, conditionals, while loops, and boolean expressions.
lists.py
Lists and tuples.
commandline.py
Using command-line arguments.
files.py
File I/O, command-line arguments, and exceptions.
functions.py
Functions.
classes.py
Classes.
dictionaries.py
Dictionaries (a.k.a. associative arrays, hash tables, etc.).

More advanced samples

listsorting.py
Sorting lists.
dictionarysorting.py
Sorting dictionaries.
directories.py
Traversing a directory tree.
getPageFromURL.py
Using the urllib2 module to retrieve a web page.
regex.py
A few simple examples using regular expressions and the re module.
cookies.py
How to use cookies in HTTP server-side programs.