Acknowledgments

This book grew out of teaching materials — handouts, exercises, lab worksheets — developed over years of introducing students to programming. Those materials were refined semester by semester as students showed me which explanations landed and which ones needed rethinking. The book is better for every student who said “I still don’t get it” and forced a clearer explanation.

Colleagues who teach introductory programming provided the kind of honest feedback that improves books: what was missing, what was unnecessary, and where the difficulty curve was wrong.

This book is part of a series, and the ideas in it were sharpened against its siblings. Think Python, Direct AI pushed the conceptual foundations deeper. Ship Python, Orchestrate AI pulled the professional practices forward. Each book made the others better.

The Python community and the open source ecosystem behind Quarto, GitHub, and GitHub Pages made it possible to write, build, and publish without a traditional publisher. The tools are free, transparent, and remarkably good.

AI tools were used throughout the writing process. Claude (Anthropic) served as a conversation partner for drafting, iterating, and refining. The process was exactly what the book advocates: consult the AI, evaluate its output, and make your own decisions. The author’s judgement shaped every page. The AI made the work faster. It did not make the decisions.