Many people have a computer but are not getting full value from it because they are unaware of how to write programs. For them I have written this tutorial.  Among their number are some of my colleagues in the American Cryptogram Association. Consequently in the teaching I am going to use examples drawn from the interesting world of ciphers, though the programming methods learned will be equally applicable to any application. 

Learning to program in python is straightforward. Unfortunately most books complicate things with unnecessary detail, baffling the learner and leading to a premature exit.

 I am going to teach you by doing. First we will make a program that enciphers plaintext with a key. Then we shall make a program to decipher with a key. You will learn by doing it, with the minimum amount of extraneous detail but acquiring the skills for writing other programs of your own.

 Finally we shall accomplish quite a difficult feat: we will write a program to break a cipher whose key is unknown. The program will use my CHURN algorithm to find the message.

With the confidence you gain from making this start in programming you will probably want to delve into books on python, to widen your knowledge of what can be done. I will give you a few leads.

 Why have I chosen the python programming language? Because everyone can download it free, because it is modern and user-friendly, and because it is well supported with Help documents. I will begin by describing what python is and how to get python into your computer.

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