Python Programming

Course Overview:

This course is designed to give delegates the knowledge to develop and maintain Python scripts using the current version (V3) of Python and comprises sessions dealing with syntax, variables and data types, operators and expressions, conditions and loops, functions, objects, collections, modules and packages, strings, pattern matching, exception handling, binary and text files, and databases.

This course aims to provide the delegate with the knowledge to be able to produce Python scripts and applications that exploit all core elements of the language including variables, expressions, selection and iteration, functions, objects, collections, strings, modules, pattern matching, exception handling I/O, and classes.

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

Target Audience:

This course is aimed at those who want to improve their Python programming skills, and for developers/engineers who want to migrate to Python from another language, particularly those with little or no object-oriented knowledge.  For those wishing to learn Python and have no previous knowledge of programming, they should look to attend our foundation course Introduction to Programming.

Course Objectives:

By actively participating in this course, you will learn about the following:

• 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.
• Handling exceptions.
• Reading from and writing to files and databases.
• Coding in an OOP manner.

Course Content:

Module 1: Course Introduction

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

Module 2: Getting Started

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

Module 3: Python Scripts & Syntax

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

Module 4: 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 and id functions

Module 5: Operators & Expressions

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

Module 6: Conditions & Loops

• Conditional statements (if, elif, else)
• Nested conditional statements
• The ternary operator
• Iterative statements (while, for, else)
• The range function
• Iterating over a list
• Break
• Continue
• Nested conditional/iterative statements

Module 7: Functions

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

Module 8: Objects & Classes

• Python's data model, dunder-methods and attributes
• About objects
• Attributes and the dot notation
• The dir function
• Mutability
• Pass by object reference
• Introduction to Classes
• Class Declaration and Instantiation
• Data attributes
• Methods
• Composition and inheritance

Module 9: 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 and reverse
• The del keyword
• Appending to and combining lists
• List comprehension
• Sequence unpacking

Module 10: Tuples

• About tuples
• Tuple syntax
• Iterating over a tuple
• Checking for the presence of a value
• Appending to and combining tuples

Module 11: Sets

• About Sets
• Set syntax
• Adding and removing set elements
• Iterating over a set
• Membership Testing
• Set methods

Module 12: 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
• Dictionary methods incl. keys, values, items, get, update and clear
• The del keyword
• Dictionary comprehension

Module 13: Strings

• About strings
• String syntax including slicing
• Escape characters
• String literals - single and double quotes, triple quotes
• Concatenation
• Formatted strings
• Other methods e.g. endswith, find, join, lower, replace, split, startswith, strip and upper

Module 14: Modules & Packages

• About modules
• 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
• Executable modules
• Reloading a module
• About packages
• Importing packaged modules
• Importing packaged module objects
• The Standard Library
• The Python Package Index
• Installing modules and packages using pip

Module 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

Module 16: Files & the Filesystem

• The open function
• 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
• ASCII and UNICODE (UTF schemes)
• UTF-8, binary and hexadecimal representations
• The ord() and chr() functions
• Binary files, bytes and bytearray
• About the pathlib module
• Renaming, copying and moving files
• Processing all files in a folder
• Checking whether a file or folder exists
• Creating files and folders

Module 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

Module 18: Spreadsheets

• Reading from spreadsheets
• Creating and editing cells
• Cell values, formulae and formatting
• Creating and writing spreadsheets

Module 19: Internet

• Making requests to web APIs, requesting web pages
• Handling responses
• Converting to and from JSON

Module 20: Graphics Introduction

• Creating, displaying and manipulating images using PIL/Pillow
• Simple drawing using Turtle
• Graphical user interfaces using Tkinter

Prerequisites:

Delegates attending this course should have some previous programming experience and be able to define general programming concepts including compilation, execution, variables, arrays, sequence, selection, iteration, functions, objects, and classes. Moreover, delegates should be able to navigate the filesystem (on the command line ideally), edit and save text files and browse the web.

This knowledge can be obtained by attendance on the pre-requisite Introduction to Programming course.

Certification / Exam:

There is no exam related to this course.

Further Information:

 For more information or to book this course, please contact our Course Enquiries Team on 0117 370 1970 or send us an email us at enquiries@skilltec.co.uk

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