Overview
This course will teach the fundamentals of Python. The course is designed for a mix of employees ranging from those with no previous programming experience, through to developers with some programming experience in another programming language. The course will have differentiated material to keep everyone engaged and challenged.
What you’ll need
- Laptop and headphones and microphone
- Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel)
- Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge
- We will provide browser-based tools for programming Python (nothing to install)
Course topics
- Getting started with Python
- Discover what Python is, how to install it, and what it’s useful for.
- History of Python
- Python’s strengths and weaknesses; what is Python good for?
- Interpreted vs Compiled Languages
- Choosing an IDE
- What is a Jupyter Notebook?
- Getting user input and printing messages
- Writing some simple programs that print out messages to screen
- Writing programs that respond to user input
- Conditional Statements
- Building Python programs that branch based upon a condition.
- We’ll use the keywords: if, elif, else
- Data Types
- Learn how Python differs from some other languages when dealing with different data types
- Write programs that perform calculations
- Working with Strings to include:
- Slicing strings
- Formatting strings
- Basic Data Structures
- Learn how to manage data with Lists, Dictionaries, Sets and Tuples
- For Loops and While Loops
- Programming with style
- Guido van Rossum, the author of Python, had a great eye for programming style. Learn how to write code that’s easy to read, understand, and follows the conventions defined by Guido and the Python community at large.
- Functions
- Learn how to write modular code that’s easy to read and easy to maintain, using functions
- Understand the importance of naming functions well
- Write functions that accept a parameter
- Yielding a result; and understanding what a generator is
- Importing Libraries
- Use built-in libraries: math and random
- Know the difference between “import random” and “from random import *”
- Learn how to do more complex tasks in Python by importing additional libraries
- Use pip to download and install additional libraries
- Jupyter Notebooks
- Try out Jupyter Notebooks
- By the end of this section, you should understand when an IDE is appropriate and when a Jupyter Notebook is the better choice