Practical Python 3.6

This workshop introduces the Python language, progressing rapidly to the real-world examples spread across 4 modules and with a final test to ensure that you retained the knowledge. We cover all the basis, from working with local files to the usage of external APIs, working with CSV and JSON.

Module 1: How to get started with Python.

What you will learn …

• Python’s philosophy.
• How to install Python
• How to use the python interpreter.
• How Python imports work.
• How to work on a virtual environment.
• How to create and run a Python script.
• Using text editors for coding.
• Standards and PEP8.
• Various modules which Python comes bundled with.

INSIDE

• Why Python?
• Introduction about python programming language
• Learning the strengths of the language and what’s good with python
• Learning where to use Python and why
• Python as an interpreted language
• How to choose correct interpreter, install it, run it
• Python virtual environments
• Text editor (kate, gedit, brackets)
• How to create Hello world, from interpreter and with .py script
• Standards and batteries included
• Standards and PEP8
• Batteries included

Module 2: Python Basics

What you will learn …

• Python flow control statements
• List, dictionaries and advanced operations on them (slicing and iterating)
• The difference between classes and instances of an object
• How Python initialises new objects
• How to override Python’s built-in methods and types
• How to login to Twitter through Python
• How to get an instance’s attributes using the Python shell

INSIDE

• Python data types and flow control statements
• If / elif / else
• For loops
• While loops
• Lists (slices), dictionaries (loop over items), sets
• Lists
• List slices
• Dictionaries
• Python Internals
• Classes and object instances
• Everything is an object (docs strings, getters, setters, override)
• Practical example

Module 3: Files

What you will learn …

• What the concept of duck typing is.
• How files work.
• The CSV Python module.
• How to use the JSON Python module.
• How to use these modules in a real life example to extract, process and save data.

INSIDE

• Files
• Duck typing
• CSV files and CSVreader
• Read
• Write
• SimpleJSON
• Practical exercise
• Read file with a sentence per line
• Manipulate and gather metrics on each sentence
• Output a file with the metrics obtained

Module 4: Practical Project – Weather forecast!

In this module, you will apply all the knowledge from the previous chapters in order to implement a Python module to read data from an API, process the information and display it, using Python plotting library. You need to do these steps in any development so that you will learn how to define what the module works:

• Read data from an API (http://openweathermap.org)
• Save the raw data in a file for safekeeping
• Transform the data, so that it can be fed to the plot module
• Plot a graph with the weather forecast

You will learn …

• How to get data from an external API
• How to transform data to suit your needs
• How to work with the Python plotting

INSIDE

• Get information from API
• Data transformation
• Plotting the data

Module 5: Final Tests

This test is made up of 20 questions in total. You can take as long as you need to answer each question.

Sample question:

Question 15:
What library can you use to create an object to store content in memory that behave like a file?
A – math
B – json
C – csv
D – StringIO

Meet the Instructor

Rui Silva is a computer Scientist from Portugal (http://alfasite.org/) He is a Python developer who loves open-source. He started working as a freelancer in 2008, while he finished his graduation in Computer Science in Universidade do Minho. After his graduation, he started pursuing a master’s degree, choosing the field of parallel computation, mobile and ubiquitous computing. He completed the mobile and ubiquitous computing course. In his 3 years of freelancing, he worked mostly with Python, developing Django websites, Drupal websites and some Magento stores. He also had to do some system administration. After that, he started working in Eurotux Informática, S.A. where he developed websites using Plone, Django and Drupal. He is also an IOS developer and sometimes he performs some system administration tasks. Besides his job, he works as a freelancer using mainly Django and other Python frameworks.

Course Format

The course is self-paced – you can visit the training whenever you want and your content will be there. Once you’re in, you keep access forever, even when you finish the course. There are no deadlines, except for the ones you set for yourself. We designed the course so that a diligent student will need about 18 hours of work to complete the training. Your time will be filled with reading, videos, and exercises.

REF: https://bsdmag.org/course/learn-to-program-using-python-practical-python-3-6/