Introductory Python

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

Keywords: python, real-course, data-science

Authors: Helena Rasche, Bazante Sanders

Status: Active

Learning objectives:

Week 1: Python is a Calculator

• Understand the fundamentals of object assignment and math in python and can write simple statements and execute calcualtions in order to be able to summarize the results of calculations and classify valid and invalid statements.
• Translate some known math functions (e.g. euclidean distance, root algorithm) into python to transfer concepts from mathematics lessons directly into Python.
• Understand the structure of a "function" in order to be able to construct their own functions and predict which functions will not work.

Week 2: Python is a Database

• Explain key differences between integers and floating point numbers.
• Explain key differences between numbers and character strings.
• Use built-in functions to convert between integers, floating point numbers, and strings.
• Explain why programs need collections of values.
• Write programs that create flat lists, index them, slice them, and modify them through assignment and method calls.

Week 3: Python is a Computer

• Write conditional statements including if, elif, and else branches.
• Correctly evaluate expressions containing and and or.
• Explain what for loops are normally used for.
• Trace the execution of a simple (unnested) loop and correctly state the values of variables in each iteration.
• Write for loops that use the Accumulator pattern to aggregate values.

Week 4: Python is a Programming Language

• catch an exception
• raise your own exception
• Read data from a file
• Write new data to a file
• Use with to ensure the file is closed properly.
• Use the CSV module to parse comma and tab separated datasets.

Week 5: Recap

• Recap all previous modules.
• Use exercises to ensure that all previous knowledge is sufficiently covered.

Week 6: Python is a Command Line Interface

• Use glob to collect a list of files
• Learn about the potential pitfalls of glob
• Learn how sys.argv works
• Write a simple command line program that sums some numbers
• Use argparse to make it nicer.

Week 7: Python is a Workflow Engine

• Run a command in a subprocess.
• Learn about check_call and check_output and when to use each of these.
• Read it's output.
• Set up a Python virtual environment for our software project using venv and pip.
• Run our software from the command line.
• Set up a Conda environment for our software project using conda.
• Run our software from the command line.