[Tutor] what programs is good for newbies

[Daniel Yoo]

On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, claudia flores wrote:

> My name is claudia and i would like to know what computer program is
> good to start that is easy and easy to learn i have no clue to
> computer programming , dont know what all those codes mean and how
> they work any info is appreciated thax


Dear Claudia,

Hello, nice to meet you!  Before we start, what's your experience with
computers?  It will be very good if you know how to use a text editor, so
if you're still unfamiliar with it, try playing around with Notepad: save
files, open them up, and make sure that you feel comfortable about
this.  It will make programming much nicer if you're not fighting the
computer for control... *grin*


Python is a programming language: you can write programs for the computer
to execute.  Writing programs can be very recreational.  For example, this
program:

###
name = 'claudia'
print 'Hello', name, 'nice to meet you!'
###

is a very simple greeting program that says:

    Hello claudia nice to meet you!

But of course, you can get the computer to do more interesting stuff as
well.  You'll probably want to start of with one of the great tutorials on
this page:

    http://python.org/doc/Intros.html


In particular:

    http://www.honors.montana.edu/~jjc/easytut/easytut/
and
    http://www.crosswinds.net/~agauld/

are very good.  


If you have any questions, just email the tutor@python.org list again, and
we'll be happy to talk about them.  Good luck!