Amit Saha

This book uses Python to teach basic High School Math. Now a lot of the stuff you do is through modules that already exist in Python. However, since you are able to manipulate the data and do other things like draw graphs, it presents a representation that is visible and more easily understood. Now the big thing about this is that it won't really be Earth-shattering unless you go and put in effort to do it. That goes for pretty much everything though I suppose.

The book guides you through installing Python and some other program that allows you to run your programs. It gives you basic grounding in IDLE, and allows you to use this program called Anaconda to run the programs you wrote. Anaconda is a bit like cmd.exe, and the other book I had recommended that I use Powershell, so I don't really have a preference yet. Challenges that are in the book have their answers online, or at least one way to do it.

This book assumes some grounding in Python and thus does not explain all of the notation that it uses. I still don't know what if __name__ == '__main__': is supposed to do, but taking it out ruins the code, so I put it in. Along the way it covers graphs, statistics, algebra, trigonometry, and calculus.

A very good reference for a beginner programmer, like me. If you are more advanced, you might become bored with what the author is talking about, since he doesn't delve too deep into the mysteries of Python.

Edit: Okay, I don't know how, but I missed the part in the book that explained if __name__ == '__main__':. Apparently it allows you to reuse blocks of code.… (mehr)