Intro to Python

Learning Goals

1. Explain why Python is a good language for teaching computational competence.
2. Write and execute simple Python programs that use functions, loops, indexing, conditionals, defensive programming, files, and lists, tuples, sets, and dictionaries.
3. Explain the DRY principle.

Python? What? Why? How?

Digging In

We're going to interactively work through the collection of IPython notebooks below. To get the notebooks and all of the supporting files, please download this python-intro.zip archive, and unzip it in the bootcamp repo that you setup during the Intro to Version Control and Git lesson. Doing that should create a python-intro directory that you can add and commit to your repo.

Now cd into the python-intro directory and launch ipython notebook.

• Basic Python
  • The python-0-resize-image notebook introduces Python in the context of manipulating image data
• Functions
  • The python-1-functions notebook covers defining and calling functions in Python and the call stack
• Loops and Indexing
  • The python-2-loops-indexing notebook introduces closed-ended loops, sequences, and slices
• Conditionals and Defensive Programming
  • The python-3-conditionals-defensive notebook introduces Booleans, conditional program flow, defensive programming with assert statements
• Files and Lists
  • The python-4-data-types notebook introduces 4 of Python's compound data types: list, tuple, set, and dictionary (or dict)

Here are the exercise notebooks that were created during the sessions. They are sparse compared to the annotated notebooks above, but they are the live-coding, hands-on work that we did:

• resize
• functions
• loops
• conditionals
• data_types

References

• Python Quick Reference
• 29 Common Python Errors on 1 Page
• Official Python Documentation
• Facts and Myths About Python Names and Values
• Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python - slightly dated, but still contains a lot of good stuff

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