Python 101
This half-day tutorial presents the basics of Python to beginning and intermediate programmers. It pairs well with Python 102 which follows a similar outline but goes much deeper.
Rather than starting with "Hello, world!", we use the interactive Python interpreter to get hands-on familiarity with much of core Python before covering blocks and scripts.
The tutorial is divided into short sections, each with presentation and exercises, to quickly cover lots of ground.
Advanced topics are introduced throughout and covered in "extra credit" exercises such that more advanced participants can learn at their own pace.
Presenter
Stuart Williams lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and works in the financial services industry. He taught Python 101 and 102 at PyCon 2008, taught Introduction to Computer Science in Python as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, developed a Python summer camp for high school students, and started the Winnipeg Python Users Group where he contributes regularly. He grew up in temperate rain but now enjoys four strong seasons and commutes by bicycle even at -30. He and his wife keep happily busy with three young children.
Requirements
Bring a laptop computer with Python 2.6 installed. Python version 2.5 or prior will do in a pinch. Try to get as much of an overview of Python before the tutorial as you have time to in order to get more out of the tutorial. Two angles on this are the Python Quick Reference at http://rgruet.free.fr/PQR25/PQR2.5.html and the Python website's tutorial at http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html.
Class Outline
- Numbers and operators
- Strings - immutability, operators, methods, functions, and formatting
- Introspection
- Tuples and Lists
- List Comprehensions
- Objects and Variables
- Dictionaries
- Loops and Blocks
- Iterables
- Generator Expressions
- Functions
- Generators
- Namespaces
- Simple Classes
- Exceptions
Video
Two of the three hours of the video recording of this tutorial are posted on blip.tv at http://blip.tv/file/1999483/ and http://blip.tv/file/1999358/ but you'll also want the printout to make sense of it. For that go see http://swilliams.ca/python-tutorials
.