Python – Foundation

Who should attend:

Python is the most popular open-source language.  People who want to use Python in their work.  This is a foundation course in Python suitable for beginners.   It focuses on using Python for data analysis.

What you will gain:

You will get a taste for Python and what it can do.  You will learn how to get started in Python; use common Python libraries and write your own functions in Python.

Programme Outline:

Get started in Python: Write “Hello World” in Python. Using Jupyter notebooks to write, test, and document Python scripts.

Running Python in Google Colab (a free browser-based service for editing and running Python code)

Python Language fundamentals:  syntax, variables, control flow, loops

Python’s intrinsic data types: int, float and str (strings)

How to index and slice arrays such as strings and lists – and why this is useful.

What is an API and how to retrieve data from APIs with the requests package.

Data structures: Why they are useful and ubiquitous.

  • lists: create, append, remove, sort, elements in a list.  Loop through the elements with a list comprehension
  • tuples, create, use in functions and unpack into variables
  • dicts, and their many uses.

Write and use functions: the basic structure of a function, positional and named arguments, return values.

A whirlwind tour of a few popular useful Python packages e.g. requests for getting data from APIs and web pages, math, datetime,…