Practical Python Programming

[4.5 days] This course, designed for professional software developers, scientists, and engineers, is a comprehensive introduction to the Python programming language, standard library, and Python programming techniques. Although the course assumes no prior experience with Python, the course is strongly focused on using Python for various data processing, scripting tasks, and systems administration tasks.

Major topics include:

• An introduction to python
• Working with data and collections
• Program organization and functions
• Modules and libraries
• Classes and objects
• Testing, debugging, and profiling
• Iterators and generators
• Text processing and parsing
• Files and the file system
• Accessing web services via Python
• Parsing common data formats (XML, JSON, CSV, etc.)

Detailed Course Outline

1. Introduction to Python. An introduction to the Python programming language. Covers details of how to start and stop the interpreter and write programs. Introduces Python's basic datatypes, files, functions, and error handling.
2. Working with Data. A detailed tour of how to represent and work with data in Python. Covers tuples, lists, dictionaries, and sets. Students will also learn how to effectively use Python's very powerful list processing primitives such as list comprehensions. Finally, this section covers critical aspects of Python's underlying object model including variables, reference counting, copying, and type checking.
3. Program Organization and Functions. More information about how to organize larger programs into functions. A major focus of this section is on how to design functions that are reliable and can be easily reused in other settings. Also covers technical details of functions including scoping rules, documentation strings, and exception handling.
4. Modules and Libraries. How to organize programs into modules and details on using modules as a tool for creating extensible programs. This section concludes with a overview of some of the most commonly used library modules and instructions on how to install third party library modules. Some of the standard library modules covered in this section include those related to the file system and file handling, subprocesses, regular expressions, XML, data serialization, and database access.
5. Classes and Objects. An introduction to object-oriented programming in Python. Describes how to create new objects, overload operators, and utilize Python special methods. Also covers some basic principles of object oriented programming including inheritance.
6. Inside the Python Object Model. A detailed look at how objects are implemented in Python. Major topics include object representation, attribute binding, inheritance, memory management, and special properties of classes including properties, slots, and private attributes.
7. Testing, Debugging, and Software Development Practice. This section discusses many isses that are considered important to Python software development. This includes effective use of documentation strings, program testing using both the doctest and unittest modules, and effective use of assertions. The Python logging, debugging, and profiling modules are also described.
8. Generators. Covers the iteration protocol, generators, and generator expressions. A major focus of this section concerns the use of generators to set up data processing pipelines--a particularly effective technique for addressing a wide variety of common systems programming problems (e.g., processing large datafiles, handling infinite data streams, etc.).
9. Some Advanced Topics. A variety of more advanced programming topics including variable argument functions, anonymous functions (lambda), closures, decorators, static and class methods, and packages.

Course Materials

Students will receive a bound 300-page fully indexed set of lecture notes along with a complete set of more than 50 class exercises (distributed electronically). All class exercises come with solution code for later study and for use during the class.