Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Day 1 lecture

Welcome to the Saturday lecture section of the Community Data Science Workshop! For about 2 hours, we'll work through an introduction to the Python programming language via both a lecture and hand-on exercises.

Resources

• Python data types cheat sheet
• Python loops cheat sheet
• state_capitals.py -- the state capitals example.

Lecture outline

1. review Friday material
   • math: using python as a calculator
     • addition, subtraction, multiplication, division
     • division shows something different: 8/2 versus 1/2
   • type()
     • there are different types of things in python (called objects)
     • variables that "know about the decimal place" (int) and variables that don't (floats)
   • variables
     • assignment of variaibles
     • e.g., math with variables: scale up a recipe, into an assignment
   • strings
   • booleans
   • if/elif/else
   • functions
     • exit(), help(), type()
2. lists
   • purpose
   • initialization
   • len() review
   • accessing elements
   • adding elements
   • changing elements
   • slicing lists
   • strings are like lists
3. loops and more flow control
   • for loops
   • if statements inside for loops
   • nested for loops
   • range()
   • while loops
   • infinite loops
   • if statements inside while loops
   • break
   • raw_input()
4. dictionaries
   • purpose
   • initialization
   • accessing elements
   • adding elements
   • changing elements
   • keys() and values()
5. modules
   • purpose
   • builtins
   • imports
   • import random
   • random.randint
   • random.choice
   • walk through state_capitals.py

Where state_capitals.py from http://mako.cc/teaching/2014/cdsw/state_capitals.py is the grand finale and synthesis of lecture material.