The purpose of this class it to help a beginner program pick up practical Python skills that will benefit their work.

First, here is a short list of introductory resources to get you started:

• For a beginner programmer (this is where I started) here is a fun way to start: (https://www.codecademy.com/)

• Here is a very through online textbook I recommend: (http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/)

• I always recommend (https://www.codewars.com/dashboard) and (https://www.hackerrank.com/) for practice.

• If you already have a programming foundation, here is quick resource to lay out the syntax of Python: (https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/python/)

• Finally here is a much more extensive list of Python MOOCs: (https://www.fullstackpython.com/best-python-resources.html)

The classes are taught to the interests of the class at a given time. There is no planned syllabus, but here is an inventory of the topics we have covered thus far. I will continue to update this list as we go.

Short example of how to send and request data from an API.

Example use case of BeautifulSoup to parse Instagram html and find who you follow who doesn't follow you, and vice versa. Applicable to Web Scraping.

Pythonically create lists from loops in a single line.

Examples of clean ways to loop through python iterables. These best practices make your code easier to read.

Numpy is the base of arrays in python, two dimensional data. Pandas is built from this.

Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is

Pandas is the go to for tabular (table based, e.g. Excel) data in python. If you can do it in Excel, SQL, etc. than you can do it in Pandas.

The examples here focus on getting your data into and out of excel, be it from csv, excel, sql databases etc.

Practice problems for pair programming, in class work though, and homework.

Basics from first few days of class.

Helpful walkthrough of some of the most common Python Packages and their uses, see README.

Examples of some of the most relevant functions in ds_util, a repository the DS team is developing to make common tasks easier.

A brief overview of scraping information from websites using Beautiful Soup.