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

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
  - you can assign to a variable and it will replace the old value
- strings
  - things within quotation marks
  - adding strings with "concatination" (smushing things together)
  - e.g., print("Hello" + name)
  - concatenating strings and integers don't work (e.g., print(1 + "mako"))
  - 1 is different than "1"; name is different than "name"
  - single quotes versus double quotes (python doesn't care)
  - you can also multiply strings! (although it's not clear why you want to weird)
- booleans
  - comparisons (e.g., 1 == 1 or 1 == 0)
    - you can compare strings (case sensative!)
    - also >, <, and !=
  - type() shows that the output of True or False is bool
- if/elif/else
- functions
  - has a parentheses
  - we've already learnd examples of this: exit(), help(), type()
lists
- purpose
- initialization
- len() review
- accessing elements
- adding elements
- changing elements
- slicing lists
- strings are like lists
  - len()
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()
dictionaries
- purpose
- initialization
- accessing elements
- adding elements
- changing elements
- keys() and values()
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.