by Simon Bluck

What this course covers

This Python Course covers what’s useful to know so you can quickly and easily set about writing Python programs. Detailed Python programming will be covered progressively in subsequent courses.

The course assumes a varied audience, from those that may have very little computing/programming experience, to those who have already been actively programming in Python. The aim is to get everyone up to the point where they feel confident in using Python and writing useful programs. But we can’t cover everything in this short course: Python, and all that has been written by skilled people the world over in support of it, is extensive.

Please feel free to seek assistance with understanding Python, particularly with the topics covered in the course sessions.

Simon Bluck

Table of Contents

Session One: Jan 23, 2016 – Introduction and Setup – session material

Computers and Programming
What is Python?
Working with Python
Online Information

Session Two: Feb 27, 2016 – Basic Constructs – session material
– Editors
– IDEs
– Debuggers
– Tracing
– Converting Python 2 programs to Python3

Session Three: Mar 26, 2016 – Modules, Strings, loops, functions and files session material

Doc strings
Importing a module
How Python finds a module
Module layout and boilerplate
Comments

Session Four: Sep 24, 2016 – Approaching Coding, Input and Output – session material

Coding style
Documentation
An example from the pygame library

Session Five: Oct 22, 2016 – Exceptions – session material

Prelude
Learning Python
Language composition
Literals
Objects, values and types
Types
Operating on data
Assignment and expressions
Loops, conditions and iterators

Session 6: Feb 25, 2017 – Functions and More
session material String Formatting
session material (pdf) Regular Expressions
session material Intro to tkinter

Prelude
More on strings
Loops
Functions
Input and Output

Session 7: Apr 22, 2017 – Decorators – session material

Concepts
– Constructing a Decorator
– Some Uses for Decorators