Python Programming 1

Course Overview

Python is an object oriented rapid development language deployed in many scenarios in the modern world.

This Python Programming 1 course is designed to give delegates the knowledge to develop and maintain Python scripts using the current version (V3) of Python.

There are many similarities between Python V2 and Python V3. The skills gained on this course will allow the delegate to develop their own skills further using Python V2 or V3 to support the development and maintenance of scripts.

The Python Programming 1 course comprises sessions dealing with syntax, variables and data types, operators and expressions, conditions and loops, functions, objects, collections, modules and packages, strings, pattern matching, dates, exception handling, files, and databases.

Exercises and examples are used throughout the course to give practical hands-on experience with the techniques covered.

Course Prerequisites

• • Familiarity with programming concepts is useful, this knowledge can be obtained by attendance on the Introduction to Programming course.

Target Audience for this Course

• • The Python Programming 1 course is aimed at anyone who wants to learn Python as a first language, and developers/engineers who want to migrate to Python from another language, particularly those with little or no object-oriented knowledge.
    

Skills Gained from this Training

• • Writing and testing simple scripts
    Representing data using built-in and custom data types
    Building expressions
    Building conditional and iterative statements
    Declaring and calling functions
    Using objects
    Creating and manipulating collections including lists, tuples, and dictionaries
    Creating and manipulating strings
    Creating modules and packages, and using third-party libraries
    Pattern matching
    Working with date and time objects
    Handling exceptions
    Reading from and writing to files and databases
    Coding in an OOP manner

Included with this course

• • Comprehensive course materials and exercises

Course Content

• DAY 1

  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
  • 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)
  • 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
  

• DAY 2

  Session 6: FUNCTIONS
  • Declaration
  • Invocation
  • Default values for parameters
  • Named arguments
  • args and kwargs
  • Returning multiple values
  • Nested functions
  • Functions as data
  • Introduction to lambda expressions
  • Variable scope
  • The pass keyword
  Session 7: OBJECTS
  • About objects
  • Attributes and the dot notation
  • Data attributes
  • Method attributes
  • The dir function
  • Magic methods and operator overloading
  • Mutability
  • Variables: references to objects
  • Variable assignment (again)
  • Pass by reference
  • The id function and identity operator
  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.
  

• DAY 3

  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
  • 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
  

• DAY 4

  Session 15: DATES
  About the datetime module
  datetime object attributes
  Creating a datetime object
  Date arithmetic
  Formatting dates
  Session 16: EXCEPTION HANDLING
  About exceptions and exception handling
  Handling exceptions (try, except, else, finally)
  Exception types
  The exception object
  Raising exceptions
  Custom exception types
  Session 17: 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
  File parsing for files of type CSV, XML, JSON, YAML
  About the os module
  os module functions incl. getcwd, listdir, mkdir, chdir, remove, rmdir etc.
  Session 18: DATABASES
  The DB-API
  DP-API implementations
  Establishing a connection
  Creating a cursor
  Executing a query
  Fetching results
  Transactions
  Inserting, updating, and deleting records