Snake Wrangling for Kids, Learning to Program with Python by Jason R. Briggs

Dear Parental Unit or other Caregiver, In order for your child to get started with programming, you’re going to need to install Python on your computer. This book has recently been updated to use Python 3.0–this latest version of Python is not compatible with earlier versions, so if you have an earlier version of Python installed, then you’ll need to download an older release of the book. Installing Python is a fairly straight-forward task, but there are a few wrinkles depending upon what sort of Operating System you’re using. If you’ve just bought a shiny new computer, have no idea what to do with it, and that previous statement has filled you with a severe case of the cold chills, you’ll probably want to find someone to do this for you. Depending upon the state of your computer, and the speed of your internet connection, this could take anything from 15 minutes to a few hours. First of all, go to www.python.org and download the latest Windows installer for Python 3. At time of writing, this is: http://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.0.1/python-3.0.1.msi Double-click the icon for the Windows installer (you do remember where you downloaded it to, don’t you?), and then follow the instructions to install it in the default location (this is probably c:\Python30 or something very similar). After installation. . . . . .You might need to sit down next to your child for the first few chapters, but hopefully after a few examples, they should be batting your hands away from the keyboard to do it themselves. They should, at least, know how to use a text editor of some kind before they start (no, not a Word Processor, like Microsoft Word—a plain, old-fashioned text editor)—they should at least able to open and close files, v create new text files and save what they’re doing. Apart from that, this book will try to teach the basics from there.