Python

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