Worked through section 1.5 of PPP. Love the conciseness and the exercises at the end of each section.

brief notes on some things new to me

• Variables are case-sensitive in python. name != Name
• Bitwise operations: worked through some examples with Claude; i get the general idea but might have to revisit again.
• floating point numbers are inexact when representing decimals; not language specific issue, but the underlying floating point hardware on the CPU.

>>> a = 2.1 + 4.2
>>> a == 6.3
False
>>> a
6.300000000000001

• common string methods:

s.endswith(suffix)     # Check if string ends with suffix
s.find(t)              # First occurrence of t in s
s.index(t)             # First occurrence of t in s
s.isalpha()            # Check if characters are alphabetic
s.isdigit()            # Check if characters are numeric
s.islower()            # Check if characters are lower-case
s.isupper()            # Check if characters are upper-case
s.join(slist)          # Join a list of strings using s as delimiter
s.lower()              # Convert to lower case
s.replace(old,new)     # Replace text
s.rfind(t)             # Search for t from end of string
s.rindex(t)            # Search for t from end of string
s.split([delim])       # Split string into list of substrings
s.startswith(prefix)   # Check if string starts with prefix
s.strip()              # Strip leading/trailing space
s.upper()              # Convert to upper case

• dir() produces a list of all operations that can appear after the (.). Use the help() command to get more information about a specific operation:

>>> help(s.upper)
Help on built-in function upper:

upper(...)
    S.upper() -> string

    Return a copy of the string S converted to uppercase.
>>>