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Open Water Foundation / Learn Python

Introduction

This documentation provides learning resources for the Python programming language. The documentation has been created by the Open Water Foundation to facilitate our work and is being made available in the hope that it also helps others.

If you are reading this documentation, you have likely already decided that Python is a language that you want to use for programming. This documentation is written for a range of experience because it is difficult to know the reader's level of knowledge and skills. Effort has been taken to try to not bore the reader with extensive background, but rather to split lessons into clearly separate topics. This documentation focuses on practical issues that, if understood, will minimize frustration and increase the efficiency of the software development process.

See also other OWF learning resources, including resources for other programming languages.

This documentation is a work in progress and may contain notes for inserts for awhile until time can be devoted to filling in blanks.

About the Open Water Foundation

The Open Water Foundation is a nonprofit social enterprise that focuses on developing and supporting open source software and open data for water resources to make better decisions about water. OWF has created this documentation to educate its staff, students, and other developers that are working on Python software.

See also other OWF learning resources.

How to Use This Documentation

This documentation is not intended to be a full reference for the Python language but focuses on important topics that will help a Python programmer understand important technical concepts and be successful with software tools. The documentation can also be used by novice programmers such as students to help understand core concepts.

The documentation is organized in sections as follows:

  • Training Sessions - training sessions include sequences of lessons to learn an integrated concept
  • Lessons - lessons focus on specific topics, and may be used in one or more training sessions
  • Development Tasks - development tasks are common work activities
  • Resources - reference resources

The table of contents on the left lists pages on this website. The table of contents on the right lists sections on the current page. The table of contents may be shown as an icon if the page width is narrow.

Documentation Conventions

The following conventions are used throughout the documentation:

  • As much as possible, content is provided for multiple operating system environments (Windows, Cygwin, Git Bash, Linux), with operating system name and logo shown to indicate the context.
  • Sections are organized to allow similar implementation for other programming languages, to allow comparison of language features
  • Code and command line content is shown in fixed width font
  • Command line prompt is shown for operating system:
    • > for Windows
    • $ for Linux variant (Linux, Cygwin, Git Bash)
    • $> as generic prompt (Windows or Linux)

License

The OWF Learn Python website content and examples are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Source Repository on GitHub

The source files for this documentation are maintained in a GitHub repository: owf-learn-python.

Release Notes

See the Release Notes in the GitHub Project and repository issues.