Most chapters have small exercises sprinkled throughout the text. These exercises are there to enlighten a point or for you to do a quick check if you understood the material up to that moment. You should try to do these exercises immediately when you encounter them. Answers to these exercises are seldom provided, because if you understood the material, they should be really easy to do, while if you did not understand the material, you should either re-read the chapter until you do, or ask someone for assistance.

At the end of most chapters, a separate “Exercises” section is given, with one or more numbered exercises. You are supposed to do all of these exercises, and you should be able to do them independently (i.e., without help of other people and without looking up solutions from outside sources). Answers to these numbered exercises are provided in the back of the book, in Appendix 341, and can also be downloaded from the website associated with this book (http://www.spronck.net/pythonbook2). I wish to stress the following points:

For starters, here are two numbered exercises for the first chapter. Learn from them.