Introducing the "for" loop

[Irv Kalb]

> 
> As long as I have two teachers here, which textbooks are you using? I am hoping to teach a college course in Python next fall.
> 
> Thanks,
> Bill
> 
> 

At least one more.  I teach Intro to Python courses at two colleges in Silicon Valley.  These courses are aimed at students who have zero background in programming.  In fact, one of the colleges is a game design college and most students are art students.  

I was contacted by a publisher about turning my course into a book.  After about a year, the book was published in Sept. 2016 by aPress, a division of Springer.  The book is a superset of the material I teach in my classes.  The book's title is "Learn to Program with Python" and is available on the aPress web site, on Amazon.com <http://amazon.com/>, and at better bookstore everywhere  :)

aPress:   http://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484218686 <http://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484218686>       They also have an eBook version available

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Program-Python-Irv-Kalb/dp/148421868X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1507250994&sr=8-1&keywords=kalb+python

In retrospect, the only problem with the book is that all the example code is built in Python 2.7 (which is what we were using at both colleges at the time).  However, in the small number of cases where there are differences, I explain the Python 3 way of doing the same thing (e.g., the print statement vs the print function).

Irv

PS:  I teach the while loop way before I teach the for loop.  That's because I use while loops to show how to allow the user to do things like play a small game over and over until the user says that they want to quit.  I introduce the for loop only after teaching about lists, as a means of iterating through a list.  The range function is discussed after that.