Python has become one of the most popular programming languages in recent years and arguably the single most popular language for text processing. It is a fun and extremely easy-to-use language with wide spectrum of applications, ranging from AI to Web Services. It also supports objected-oriented and functional programming paradigms. The first half of this course will teach Python, but focusing on high-level programming methodologies (such as data structures, recursion, graph algorithms, etc.) rather than low-level language-specific details. The second half of this course will be applications of Python to text processing, which includes some basic Natural Language Processing techniques and tools such as NLTK. Finally we will also demonstrate Web applications using Python.