This workshop is an introduction to basic programming concepts and abstractions. It is laid out for hands-on workshops taking up roughly 4 hours. While we have tried to be compatible with Python 2 _and_ 3 wherever possible, we'd strongly encourage you to use Python 3.

The initial version of this material was loosely based on the "Python für Kids" book by Gregor Lingl. It is conceptual-- rather than incidental --that it trades in idioms for learnability. We believe that beginners sometimes have to jump through one or another hoop to fully comprehend the scope and applicability of a concept. Every introduced abstraction solves another pain point in the life of a beginning programmer.

You can view this workshop being hosted here: http://opentechschool.github.io/python-beginners/

The following sections are for people who want to contribute.

This workshop is written in the reStructuredText format. The .rst files can be edited with a normal text editor.

It can be rendered to several output formats using Sphinx. To do that, you need to have the following Python packages installed:

• docutils
• Pygments
• Sphinx
• Fabric
• sphinx-intl

You can install these with pip using pip install -r requirements.txt

The fabric script fabfile.py contains tasks making the build process very easy. The following commands have to be executed in the docs directory.

If you just want to render the HTML version, it's sufficient to run

fab build

This will create a directory _build, containing the HTML version.

Other builders can be passed as argument. For instance use singlehtml to render the whole tutorial into a single HTML file.

fab build:singlehtml

1. Translation (pot) templates must be built or updated - fab gen_pots
2. Templates must merged/built into po translation files - fab update_pos:de

3. po files must be checked and translated correctly
4. fab build will compile po files, and build the docs for each language

The workshop is deployed as a GitHub Page. A good way to do that is described here. To simplify this process, you can use the fabric target setup.

fab setup

This recreates the _build/html folder by building the project, while the folder is cloned to the gh-pages branch. You can simple cd into the folder thereafter and push new updates, or use fab build to rebuild it.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.