Chapter One. Elements of Programming

Our goal in this chapter is to convince you that composing a program is easier than writing a piece of text, such as a paragraph or essay. Writing prose is difficult: you spend many years in school to learn how to do it. By contrast, just a few building blocks suffice to enable you to compose programs that can solve all sorts of fascinating, but otherwise unapproachable, problems. In this chapter, we take you through these building blocks, get you started on programming in Python, and study a variety of interesting programs. You will be able to express yourself (by ...

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