How to Train Your Python: Part 1, Introduction

Recently I've been looking around our wonderful community and I've seen some absolutely hands-down fantastic python scripting articles.

But, in the end, these series weren't very extensive. I've been wanting to do a series on teaching python for a while now, and I don't mean just the basics, I mean to make an extensive series that takes it all the way from "Hello, World!" to popular third party modules, and everything in between!

Why Python?

The reason for choosing python is because it's a rather simple and forgiving language. Python is a scripting language, which means it doesn't need to be compiled, and uses an interpreter.

Among scripting languages, python is extremely forgiving. It doesn't take a lot to get used to the syntax and general layout of python scripts.

This makes python a great first language for anyone interested in taking the first steps towards scripting.

In addition to being very forgiving and easy to learn, python is very powerful. There are a wealth of third party libraries that can make the average python script into something much more useful. So, in synopsis, python is easy, forgiving, and powerful, all the hallmarks of a good language!

What We'll Be Covering...

As I previously stated, I want this to be an extensive series. By the end of this series I want all of it's participants to not only be able to read and write python, but to pick up some tricks and lessons along the way. We'll be covering a lot, but I've lumped them into four general categories for the sake of organization.

• First, we'll be learning the basics. The if's, else's, try's, except's, for's, while's, the whole nine yards. This category will have many sub-categories within it in order to keep things nice and tidy. By the end of this first category I hope that the participants will be able to understand the basics of python and will be able to read and write it.

• Secondly, we'll be learning the conventions of python. This is important for other people who see your code. The python community has a certain way of doing certain things, and in order to reach the most amount of people with your code, you'll need to play by the rules. In this category we'll be covering some of the conventions set forth by the python community.

• Third, we'll be covering modules that come packaged with python. There are many modules that come pre-packaged with the python interpreter, some of these that you will see often are sys, os, logging, and socket. These are just a few out of the huge list of modules there are. I hope that after this category, the participants will be able to utilize these libraries to make their code that much better.

• Last, but certainly not least, we'll be covering some popular third party modules. One shimmering example of this is scapy. If you've ever read any of my tutorials on scripting your own tools, you'll already know that scapy is extremely useful, and that's just one library! By the end of this section I hope that the participants will be able to utilize some third party modules to specialize certain scripts.

In Summary

I've been looking forward to making this series for a good while now, and I've finally packaged it in a way I think will benefit the community the best way that it can! I'm very excited to cover python and see what the community comes up with! There will be small exercises in each article so you can write the code yourself as opposed to just reading it. So, without further adieu, it's time to start training your python!