Python Programming 1

Course Introduction

• Administration and Course Materials
• Course Structure and Agenda
• Delegate and Trainer Introductions

Session 1: GETTING STARTED

• About Python
• Python versions
• Python documentation
• Python runtimes
• Installing Python
• The REPL shell
• Python editors

Session 2: PYTHON SCRIPTS & SYNTAX

• Script naming
• Comments
• Docstring
• Statements
• The backslash
• Code blocks
• Whitespace
• Console IO (to enable the writing of simple programs)
• A first Python program
• Script execution

Session 3: VARIABLES & DATA TYPES

• Literals
• Identifiers
• Assignment
• Numbers (bool, int, float, complex)
• Binary, octal, and hexadecimal numbers
• Floating point accuracy
• Collections (str, list, tuple, set, dict)
• None
• Implicit and explicit type conversion (casting)
• The type function

Session 4: OPERATORS & EXPRESSIONS

• Arithmetic Operators
• Assignment Operators
• Comparison Operators
• Logical Operators
• Membership Operators
• Bitwise Operators
• Identity Operators

Session 5: CONDITIONS & LOOPS

• Conditional statements (if, elif, else)
• Nested conditional statements
• Short hand if/if else
• Python's alternative to the ternary operator
• Iterative statements (while, for, else)
• The range function
• Iterating over a list
• Break
• Continue
• Nested conditional/iterative statements

Session 6: FUNCTIONS

• Declaration
• Invocation
• Default values for parameters
• Named arguments
• args and kwargs
• Returning multiple values
• None returned
• Variable scope
• Masking and shadowing
• The pass keyword
• Recursive functions

Session 7: OBJECTS AND CLASSES

• About objects
• Attributes and the dot notation
• The dir function
• Dunder attributes
• Mutability
• The id function
• Pass by reference
• Introduction to Classes
• Class Declaration and Instantiation
• Data attributes
• Methods
• Composition

Session 8: LISTS

• About lists
• List syntax including slicing
• Getting and setting list elements
• Iterating over a list
• Checking for the presence of a value
• The len function
• List methods incl. append, insert, remove, pop, clear, copy, sort, reverse etc.
• The del keyword
• Appending to and combining lists
• List comprehension

Session 9: TUPLES

• About tuples
• Tuple syntax
• Getting tuple elements including unpacking
• Iterating over a tuple
• Checking for the presence of a value
• The len function
• Appending to and combining tuples

Session 10: SETS

• About Sets
• Dictionary syntax
• Creating, adding and removing set elements
• Iterating over a set
• Membership Testing
• Sorting
• Copying
• Set methods incl. union, intersection, difference, symmetric_difference etc.

Session 11: DICTIONARIES

• About dictionaries
• Dictionary syntax
• Getting and setting dictionary elements
• Iterating over a dictionary (keys, values, and items)
• Checking for the presence of a key
• The len function
• Dictionary methods incl. keys, values, items, get, pop, popitem, clear etc.
• The del keyword
• Dictionary comprehension

Session 12: STRINGS

• About strings
• String syntax including slicing
• Escape characters
• Triple-quoted strings
• Concatenation
• Placeholders
• The format method
• Other methods e.g. endswith, find, join, lower, replace, split, startswith, strip, upper etc.
• A string as a list of bytes

Session 13: MODULES & PACKAGES

• About modules
• Inbuilt modules math, random and platform
• the dir() and help() functions
• Creating and using modules
• the __pycache__ and the .pyc files
• The module search path
• Importing modules
• Namespaces
• Importing module objects
• The import wildcard
• Aliases
• Importing within a function
• Executable modules
• Reloading a module
• About packages
• Importing packaged modules
• Importing packaged module objects
• Package initialisation
• Subpackages
• Referencing objects in sibling packages
• The Standard Library
• Installing modules and packages using pip

Session 14: PATTERN MATCHING

• About regular expressions
• Regular expression special characters
• Raw strings
• About the re module
• re module functions incl. match, search, findall, full match, split, sub

Session 15: EXCEPTION HANDLING

• About exceptions and exception handling
• Handling exceptions (try, except, else, finally)
• Exception types
• The exception object
• Raising exceptions
• Custom exception types
• Built-in exceptions hierarchy

Session 16: FILES & THE FILESYSTEM

• The open function
• Methods for seeking (seekable, seek)
• Methods for reading from a file (readable, read, readline, readlines)
• Iterating over a file
• Methods for writing to a file (writable, write, writelines)
• Introduction to context managers
• Text encoding schemes, codepoints, codespace
• ASCII and UNICODE (UTF schemes)
• UTF-8, binary and hexadecimal representations
• The ord() and chr() functions
• Binary files, bytes and bytearray
• I/O layered abstraction.
• About the os module
• os module functions incl. getcwd, listdir, mkdir, chdir, remove, rmdir etc.
• OSError numbers and the errno module

Session 17: DATABASES

• The DB-API
• DP-API implementations
• Establishing a connection
• Creating a cursor
• Executing a query
• Fetching results
• Transactions
• Inserting, updating, and deleting records