Python Programming

A training course for programmers of other languages

Prerequisites: This course is aimed at people with at least a six months programming experience in any mainstream language such as C, C++, or Java.

"Better than anything at University. I will actually use what I learned!.",
—Attendee Feedback

The course is divided into topic-specific modules, each of which is divided into sessions. This course has a fixed core curriculum of sessions 1-39 and 41-45. All the other sessions are optional (but recommended), and since for any given course there is normally only time to do a proportion of them, the participants choose which ones to skip. When done on-site the course can be done in just four days, if necessary, by doing fewer sessions.

The course can be taught based on Python 2 (2.5-2.7) or Python 3 (3.1 or later).

Each session takes about 30-90 minutes each. Most sessions have four parts:

Introduction/Overview/Key Concepts
Code Review (i.e., how to do the thing/use the feature in practice)
Exercise(s)
Review of Solution(s)

There are also some brief “Interludes”; these are short 5-10 minute talks.

It is usual to do 6-10 sessions each day.

Course outline:

Python Interpreters and the Python Edit/Run Cycle

Python Interpreters and the Python Edit/Run Cycle

Python Preview

A quick preview so we can have decent examples and exercises from the start

Procedural Programming

Keywords, Identifiers, and Object References
Single Valued Data Types
Collection Types (Multi-valued Data Types)
Control Structures
Exception Handling
Custom Functions

Interlude Procedural vs. Object-Oriented Programming
Object-Oriented Programming

Concepts and Terminology
“Old”-style (classic) vs. “new”-style classes
Constructors and initializers
Special methods to make custom types fully pythonic
Creating Custom Single Value Classes
Creating Custom Collection Classes

Interlude Refactoring
Functional-Style Programming I

What is Functional Programming and why functional-style?
The Functional Classics
Closures and Partial Function Application

Unicode

Unicode

File Handling

Writing and Reading Binary Files with pickles
Writing and Parsing Text Files with JSON
Writing and Parsing Text Files
Writing and Parsing XML Files with etree
Writing and Reading Binary Files

User Interfaces

Command line programs using argparse
Introduction to GUI programming with Tkinter

Modules and Packages

Packages, Importing, and Modules

Interlude Test Driven Development/Test Driven Design
Debugging, Testing, and Profiling

Handling Syntax Errors
Handling Runtime Errors
Scientific Debugging
Unit Testing
Profiling

Overview of Generic Parts of Python's Standard Library

String Handling
Mathematics and Numbers
Times and Dates
Collection Data Types
Functools and Itertools
File formats, encodings, and data persistence
File and directory handling
Subprocesses

Intermediate/Advanced Techniques I

Advanced Attributes
Function and Method Decorators
Context Managers
Generator Expressions and Generator Functions
Iterators
Factory Functions
Dynamic Code Execution

Interlude Writing More Efficient Code
Regular Expressions

Introduction to Regular Expressions
Regular Expressions in Practice
File Globbing
The “new” regex module

Databases

DBM Databases
SQL Databases
Object-Relational Mappers

Networking

Uploading and Downloading Files
High-level networking with XML-RPC

Concurrency

Introduction
Using the Multiprocessing Module
Using the Threading Module

Intermediate/Advanced Techniques II

Class Decorators
Moving from Python 2 to Python 3

A Brief Introduction to Design Patterns

Creational Design Patterns
Structural Design Patterns
Behavioral Design Patterns

Parsing

Writing Hand-Crafted Parsers

Extending Python

A very brief introduction to accessing C libraries with ctypes

Programming Project

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