= Sage background reading =

I highly recommend that you read

    http://sagemath.org/doc/tutorial/index.html

straight through before Sage Days 22.  This should take about 3 hours, and is well worth it.
You can try out the code in there online here:  http://tutorial.sagenb.org

If you don't know Python, you should read the book "Dive Into Python":

    http://diveintopython.org/

See also the notes for this course:

   http://wiki.wstein.org/10/480b