Welcome to the Arup Lunchtime Python Programming course homepage. This repository contains everything you need for the course. Here you will find session notes, links to external resourse, problem sets and solutions.
You can access enrollments for the course on moodle.
If you are lost, look at these resources (probably in that order):
- Our Cheat Sheet
- Search Stack Overflow (you will come to love this site)
- A more comprehensive Cheat Sheet
- The Python Docs
This course has been broken up into a series of sessions that introduce the concepts involved in computer programming using the python programming language. Each sesson includes a mini lecture and a problem set. It is intended that you attend a session every fortnight.
The course is intended to be worked through in a group. Please join a group and create a slack channel for your group (invite your tutor). Sessions 5, 7 & 8 are dedicated for group projects.
Session 0: Getting Set up (Pre-Work)
- Install Python
- Setup a Interactive Development Environment (IDE)
- The command prompt
Session 1: Basics Part A
- Your first program
- Flow control
- Loops
Session 2: Basics Part B
- Functions
- Module basics
Session 3: Python Data Types
- Lists and tuples
- Dictionaries
Session 4: Working with Files
- Read, edit and write text and csv files
Session 5: Group Project
- Get started making group project
- No course content
- Class will still run to give you access to tutor for help
Session 6: Good Programming Practices
- Structuring your code
- Software development processes
- Version control and developing in teams
Session 7 & 8: Group Project
- Continue working on your group project
- No course content
- Class will still run to give you access to tutor for help
Having completed the sessions you should be able to:
- Write simple programs that will enable you to do daily tasks more effectively
- Identify opportunities where programming may offer a better outcome than current practice
- Understand software development practices and work as a team on problems
- Evaluate the merit of developing applications (complexity, 3rd party alternatives etc.)
This course is for everyone! Absolutely no background required. However, think of learning programming as learning a language. It takes time to become fluent and hard work is the only way to get there.
Head over to the session 0 folder. It contains installation instructions, pre-reading and a warm-up problem set. You MUST complete this before attending the first session.
If in doubt, ASK! There is a slack channel that has been created for this course. Post any question you have there and one of the tutor or a fellow student will answer your question.
Large parts of this course were carried over from the previous course. For this we would like to sincerly thank Tom Valorsa, Ian Mackenzie and Tom Clark for their contributions to the problem sets and solutions.
We would also like to thank Kim Sherwin and Selma Parris from the Arup Uni team for their help getting all this sorted. We could not have done it without you.