Preface to the Third Edition

by Jeffrey Elkner

The Rhodes Local Edition (RLE)

by Peter Wentworth

A word of thanks …

We switched from Java to Python in our introductory courses a year ago, and so far we think the results look positive. More time will tell.

This book was a great starting point for us, especially because of the liberal permission to change things. Having our own in-house course notes or handouts allows us to adapt and stay fresh, rearrange, see what works, and it gives us agility. We can also ensure that every student in the course gets a copy of the handouts — something that doesn’t always happen if we prescribe costly textbooks in a developing country or third-world situation.

Many thanks to all the contributors and the authors for making their hard work available to the Python community and to our students.

A colleague and friend, Peter Warren, once made the remark that learning introductory programming is as much about the environment as it is about the programming language.

I’m a big fan of IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). I want help to be integrated into my editor, as a first-class citizen, available at the press of a button. I want syntax highlighting. I want immediate syntax checking, and sensible autocompletion.

I’m especially keen on having a single-stepping debugger and breakpoints with code inspection built in. We’re trying to build a conceptual model of program execution in the student’s mind, so I find most helpful for teaching to have the call stack and variables explicitly visible, and to be able to immediately inspect the result of executing a statement.

My philosophy, then, is not to look for a language to teach, but to look for a combination of IDE and language that are packaged together, and evaluated as a whole.

I’ve made some quite deep changes to the original book to reflect this (and various other opinionated views that I hold), and I have no doubt that more changes will follow if we do get to RLE versions 2, or 3, or 4.

Here are some of the key things I’ve approached differently:

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