Foundational skills in Python for general purpose programming
The objective of these workshops is to develop foundational skills in basic Python and pandas for familiarity and general purpose work. The target audience is beginners and early novices in programming.
This workshop will cover Python basics - including basic data types and data structures, conditional execution, looping, and functions. We'll then move into using pandas just a tad, the premier package for data analysis in Python, which helps to simplify coding when data can be stored in a tabular format. This will not be an exhaustive overview of Python, but is intended to introduce common functionality, provide instruction on using APIs to learn new functionality, and providing jargon and concepts for understanding other resources, references, or tutorials.
Open-source packages stand on the shoulders of giants. The content for these workshops was developed in conjunction with a number of resources specifically from Jake VanderPlas and the Software Carpentries. These resources are provided below, and provide expansive information on Python and data science packages. The Software Carpentry resource in particular provides instruction, examples, exercises, and solutions; make sure to review this resource to learn more about common tasks using Python.
Day 1
- Introduction to programming
- Python built-in data types
Day 2
- Python data structures
- Programming using Python
Day 3
- Pandas data structures
- Selected operations:
- selecting data
- filtering rows of data
- creating new computations on the data
- summarising the data
- Joining data
- Conversion to Python data structures
During these workshops, we'll have a number of breakout rooms or group coding periods where you'll work with others for discussion or develop code to solve an assignment.
A number of examples will be left to the reader. Please complete these assignments prior to coming to the next workshop. These will help in developing intuition and understanding for the next workshop topics.