Snake Wrangling for Kids: python 2.7 edition

Originally cloned from https://code.google.com/p/swfk/ repository maintained by the book's author, Jason R Briggs.

This work (the book itself) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0

Note:

Slides are original works and are also released under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

The handout was modified from the Young Coder's tutorial released under MIT License: https://github.com/mechanicalgirl/young-coders-tutorial/blob/master/LICENSE

Rationale

My colleagues and I at VCT Labs have volunteered to put on an intro-to-programming event for some local high schools in honor of CS education week. Our lead instructor, Steve Arnold, chose SWFK as the best free resource on which to base the slides and as a reference to be sent home with the kids, but we quickly ran into a complication:

• the book is compatible with python 3.0
• the live USB sticks for the event provide python 2.7

Clearly there were 2 ways to go about resolving the conflict -- add python 3 to the sticks or get a version of the book compatible with python 2.7. The former allowed too much potential for confusion if the kids managed to run the "wrong" version of python after they went home, and contrary to the suggestion in the book, their parents would be unlikely to be able to help them. So, we chose the latter, getting hold of a version of SWFK that was compatible with the system-wide copy of python on the live USB sticks.

It turned out that early versions of this book were compatible with python 2.7, but in December 2008 the author switched over to python 3 syntax instead. All of the enhancements he made after that, including the OS-specific flavors of the book, were added to the python 3 version. However, thanks to the author's generous release of the book source files under a Creative Commons license, we could have the best of both worlds with this fork: roll back to python 2.7 syntax, but keep the other enhancements.

Following modifications were made to create a python 2.7 flavor of version 0.7.7 of Snake Wrangling for Kids:

Front matter:
 change version string to 0.7.7-python2.7

Preface:
  remove it, it's all about "this book is only compatible with python 3..."

Chapter 1:
  remove reference to preface which was deleted

Chapter 9:
  python2 needs 'import Tkinter' instead of 'import tkinter'

Appendix C:
  sys.stdout.write() does not return number of characters written in python2;
  take out the new little note mentioning it

Build instructions

Note: if you don't want to make any changes, feel free to use the pre-generated PDFs under prebuilt/ subdirectory rather than building them yourself from source

• make sure texlive-latexextra package is installed (should be available via whatever you use for package management: apt-get, emerge, yum... )
• run the build: python setup.py build
• find output PDFs under target/ subdirectory