Hi guys, as many of you may be aware of I, once upon a time, had a sort of series on this blog related to the mathematical olympiad (of my country) where I kept a record of my preparation and eventual examination and advised here and there about ways to proceed based on personal experience. ( you can check it out here! )
What you may not know is that I've been continuously postponing learning to code, specifically in python, for a bit over a year now. Recently, I got the chance to join a Web Scraping Project related to current politics. I decided I would love to keep a record of that experience too, so here is the first part:
Part I: Learning Python
Since I enrolled in a relatively recent project made by very hard-working students, I'm not going to expose the preparation they encouraged. What I am going to do is divide what I learned into different phases and link possible resources below:
Phase I: Basic info, variables, data types and lists.
Intro - Version of Python (use 3.9+), the process of installing and available guide on their website. To use Python, you can use your computer's command prompt, but for proper code, I use VSCode some use Sublime or even PyCharm. There are various options available but, I generally encourage Visual Studio Code.
General awareness of the various functionalities of Python - from data storage to calculators - Try some basic exercises like making a, as previously mentioned, calculator. To truly learn coding, I think practice and fun is very important - so just mess around a bit. Try doing some calculations first or even using variables without really knowing what they are.
Variables - Learn to assign variables to various values, and that by using print() you are able to see them in the shell/terminal.
Data Types - Learn that there are different types of objects (everything is an object in python!!), such as
booleans - which are True and False, they’re really useful especially when comparing data,
strings - essentially it’s text, to introduce them you have to use single ( ’ ’ ) or double ( “ “ ) quotes,
integers and floats - both are numerical values, the difference being that floats have decimals aka floating-points ;)
Inside variables you can insert any of these values and to discover the type of a variable, let’s say A, simply insert print(type(A)) into your code and it will output in the terminal. If it’s a boolean, the output will be “bool”, if it’s a string it’ll be “str”, if it’s an integer it’ll be int and if it’s a float it’ll be float.
You can also convert data types into others, for example:
age = 1
print ( “I am” + age ) will create an error - because, although you can add strings (do try!) and add integers with themselves [check the difference between 1 + 1 and “Maria” + “Maria” \ “Maria” * 2 (you can multiply strings! If you think about it, it makes sense)], you cannot add or subtract a number from a string.
To make the code run you’ll need to do the following:
print( “I am” + str(age)) - Therefore converting the interger into a string!
Lists - Learn that a list is another data type and it is very useful to store values (by using square brackets [ ] ) A single list can contain sublists and various data types, there can be integers and strings in the same list. Learn to use those lists (subsetting lists (index based and different ways to present it), list slicing, manipulating lists (by adding, deleting and chaging values (index is useful)), etc.)
Part I; general info: In Pyhton ( ; ) is used to put different commands in the same line:
command1 ; command2
=
command1
command2
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Resources:
Google’s Python Class - The teacher is very good, from what I saw. Proper lectures are available (an hour or so) and exercises are provided. Everything is very organized and clear. Good for a relatively in-depth knowledge of Python.
DataCamp - Great balance between theory and practice, heavily advise. Videos are considerably short, it’s possible to end phase I in less than an hour. Good for initial and superficial knowledge of Python. Tried it and loved it!
Microsoft’s Intro to Python - The literal definition of short and sweet, 8 units and 16 minutes of learning. Good first contact with the programming language.
Udemy courses - Check for free ones, there are various to choose from. If there’s a reasonable amount of options, which I believe there is, I heavily advise choosing the one more heavily catered to practice. I linked one I found and had good reviews but please research some more and see what fits your learning style.
If you, as a chemist in a realm of bodiless information, look down upon a program in a test tube, and want to precipitate the independent reagents that constitute the compound that is a program, you would find that it has two elements: instructions and data. The instructions tell the CPU what to dowith the data. Typically, the way Mind gets a handle on the program’s structure is by separating it…
