Python Course aimed at Engineers and Data Scientists

Python

The Python course is intended for people new to Python. It consists of about 60% exercises with a trainer per 1 to 9 participants helping individually. At the end of the course participants will have a solid working knowledge of python and will understand its subtleties. The topics covered are:

1) Python introduction

  • Comparison of Python to Java, C, C++.
  • Main differences between Python versions 2 and 3.
  • Python program and interactive modes.

2) Types, lists, variables, control flow

  • Integers, floats, strings and operators on them.
  • Lists: construction, usage, main methods.
  • Tuples: construction, usage, differences to lists.
  • Slicing
  • Dictionaries: construction, usage, main methods.
  • Comparing lists, tuples, dictionaries with respect to same content versus to same reference.
  • Variables
  • Loops: for-loop, while-loop, break, continue.
  • If-construct.
  • Accessing command line parameters.

3) Functions

  • Basic form of functions.
  • Optional arguments.
  • Variable number of arguments.
  • Variable number of keyword arguments.
  • Variable number of ordinary and keyword arguments.
  • Functions as arguments.
  • Lambda functions.
  • Internal functions.
  • Generator functions.
  • Documentation of functions and documentation tools.

4) Modules and packages

  • Definition / analogy.
  • File relative import versus absolute import.
  • The __init__.py file.

5) Classes and inheritance

  • Class definition
  • Class constructor
  • Class methods
  • Adding / deleting attributes dynamically. Check attribute existence.
  • Attributes tied to the class intead of to an instance.
  • Deriving a class.
  • Private attributes.
  • Magic methods __str__(), __repr__(), __call__(), __equals__()

6) Exceptions

  • Try-catch construct.
  • Reraise an exception.
  • Catching a specific exception.
  • Define your own Exception.
  • Exception class hierarchy is important. Traps.
  • Assert / AssertionError

7) Standard Library, Matplotlib, regular expressions

  • copy / deepcopy
  • join, split, strip Strings
  • format strings
  • Reading and writing files.
  • Modules datetime and date.
  • with-construct.
  • Serialization of objects.
  • System functions. Calling other programs.
  • The module os for interactions with the operating system.
  • Creating visualizations with Matplotlib.
  • The module re: Working with regular expressions in Python.

8) Data bases

  • Establishing a connection from a Python program.
  • Executing SQL-commands that modify the data basis.
  • Obtaining data from a data basis.

9) Web-Services

  • Programming the client side with the module requests.
  • Programming the server side with Flask.

Each of the listed topics has one or more exercise units. The course duration is 5 days.

On request, this course can be combined with the other courses or shortened with a duration between 2 and 5 days. If you are interested in this course, please send us a message, since we plan courses dynamically on demand. (Price list).