Overview
Targeted towards experienced programmers, the Introduction to Python programming course explores the Python language from a basic to an intermediate level. The course enables participants to be able to write Python programs, work with sequences and mapping, program flow control, system calls and file manipulation. It also discusses the processes and best practices and explores concepts such as statements, control structures, functions, modules, classes, advanced classes, DB API and NumPy.
What You'll Learn
- Understand the uses of Python in software development, testing and system administration processes
- Learn to develop Python applications for different uses
- Packaging and distribution of Python applications and modules
- Communicating with a SQL database using Python
- Using Python for developing automated test scripts
Curriculum
- What is Python?
- An overview of Python
- Python language basics
- Python timeline
- Advantages and disadvantages of Python
- Getting help with pydoc
- Starting Python
- Using the interpreter
- Running a Python script
- Python scripts on Unix/Windows
- Editors and IDEs
- Using variables
- Built-in functions
- Strings
- Numbers
- Converting among types
- Writing to the screen
- Command line parameters
- About flow control
- White space
- Conditional expressions
- Relational and Boolean operators
- While loops
- Alternate loops exits
- About array types (AKA sequences)
- Lists and list methods
- Tuples
- Indexing and slicing
- Iterating through a sequence
- Nested sequences
- Sequence functions, keywords, and operators
- List comprehensions
- Generator Expressions
- File overview
- Opening a text file
- Reading a text file
- Writing to a text file
- Reading and writing raw (binary) data
- Converting binary data with struct
- About dictionaries
- Creating dictionaries
- Iterating through a dictionary
- About sets
- Creating sets
- Working with sets
- Defining functions
- Parameters
- Global and local scope
- Nested functions
- Returning values
- The sorted () function
- Alternate keys
- Lambda functions
- Sorting collections
- Using operator.itemgetter()
- Reverse sorting
- Syntax errors
- Exceptions
- Using try/catch/else/finally
- Handling multiple exceptions
- Ignoring exceptions
- The import statement
- Module search path
- Creating modules
- Using packages
- Function and module aliases
- About o-o programming
- Defining classes
- Constructors
- Methods
- Instance data
- Properties
- Class methods and data
Who should attend
The course is highly recommended for –
- Software developers
- Back-end developers
- Software engineers
- Programmers
- System administrators
Prerequisites
Participants need to have working, user-level knowledge of Unix/Linux, Mac or Windows. It would be beneficial to have basic familiarity with any programming or scripting language.