This course introduces the Python programming language as a general-purpose tool for solving everyday problems. Our focus is data journalism but the skills covered are generally useful for any project that calls for data acquisition and analysis.
Below are the major topics we'll cover:
- Python overview
- What is Python?
- Coding contexts and workflow
- Core Python features
- Basic data types (integers, strings, lists, dicts)
- Expressions and statements
- Variables as storage containers
- Flow control ("for" loops and if/elif/else)
- Built-in functions such as
lenandprint - Importing and using libraries (Python Standard Library and 3rd-party packages)
- Python features for readable, reusable code
- Functions
- Modules
- Packages
- Practical skills for getting things done
- Embracing errors
- Counting and filtering
- Reading and writing text files, CSVs and JSON
- Downloading files
- Sorting
- Analyzing data with Jupyter notebooks