Well, the first printing of my new book, “Python for Informatics – Exploring Information” has been printed on the Espresso on-demand book printer at the University of Michigan Shapiro library and is available for $10.00 (sorry no mail order at this time).

The book has its first 10 chapters completed and is the required textbook for my SI502 course and an optional textbook for my SI301 course. I will be writing 4-5 new chapters over the next 15 weeks as those two courses need them. The web site for the book with a completely free download of the course materials is www.pythonlearn.com.

I am having a lot of fun with this book because my goal is to have the book relevant to everyone – not just Computer Scientists. For me this is part of my notion of “Informatics as the necessary study of technology for everyone”. Not everyone needs to be a computer scientist – but every educated person needs to understand technology to some degree. So this book will evolve as I teach over the next few semesters to solve this need. At some point it may become a printed book – I am in early discussions with two publishers already about the print copy of the book when it is really finished.
I also will be re-working my self-paced Python web site (www.pythonlearn.com) to feature this book.

I am very grateful to be able to reuse the material from Think Python: How to Think like a Computer Scientist. Allen B. Downey and Jeff Elkner have been very helpful and supportive as I revised their work. Allen has allowed me to switch the copyright to the Creative Commons By Attribution – Share Alike so we have a more modern copyleft copyright that should be very helpful to future remixers who want to use Python for Informatics as base material for whatever they want to create.