Getting ready

• You need to download workshop repository files and necessary materials to follow this course. Download instructions are present at the Etherpad here: http://mzl.la/1Svh6Qx

Why Python?

• It’s free, well-documented, and runs almost everywhere
• Large (and growing) user base among researchers and scientists
• Easier for beginners to grasp
• Goal is to teach basic programming concepts that can be applied to other programming languages

Python Introduction

• Interpreted, dynamically typed, object-oriented very high-level language, compiles to bytecode
• Close to pseudocode, indentation marks block structure
• Popular for application development on its own
• Used as scripting language in many applications and games
  • Gimp
  • Battlefield2
  • …

Basics: Variables, types and Data Structures

• Introduction to Python variables
• Creating and assigning values to variables
• Types: Built-in types and type handling
  • Built-in: String, integers, boolean and floating point
  • type(val) returns the type of a variable (also classes)
    
  • int(val[,base]) converts to an integer (of base base)
  • float(val): Corresponding to floats
  • str(val): Corresponding to strings (classes allow this automatically)

Lists in Python

• Lists as arrays
• Indexing and Slicing

Using Python libraries

• This introduction to Python is built around an end to end scientific example: data analysis
• What is a library (module) and its usage
• Reading data from a file
• Numpy arrays and operations on arrays of data
• Selecting individual values and subsections of data
• Plotting data using matplotlib library

Control Flow: Repeating actions with loops

• What a loop does?
• Writing loops to repeat simple calculations
• Track changes to a loop variable as the loop runs
• Track changes to other variables as they are updated by a for loop

Control Flow: Making choices

• Write conditional statements including if, elif and else
• Evaluate expressions containing and and or

Creating Functions

• Defining a function, the parameters that it takes, return value
• Test and debug a function
• Scope of variables
• Set default values for function parameters
• Divide programs into small, single-purpose functions

Command-line Programs

• Using values of command-line arguments in a program
• Handling flags and files separately in a command-line program
• Reading data from standard input in a program

Thank You!