Hi there everybody,
Welcome to The Billionth Introduction to Python. My name is Jonathan Forrest Sherman, and I'm going to try to help you become familiar with Python and some of its core packages, such as Numpy and Matplotlib. In particular, this short introduction will be helpful to those looking to jumpstart into typical Pythonic fields such as data science and machine learning. But we don't do any of that here quite yet, otherwise we wouldn't qualify for the Billionth Introduction to Python, but only the 100 millionth introduction to data science, or the 10 millionth introduction to machine learning. Thanks for your understanding!
Prerequisites of knowledge and programming environment setup (skip if you already have Python, Anaconda and Jupyter Notebook)
Good news! You don't need to have any knowledge whatsover to take the Billionth Introduction to Python. You have been born on this planet. Therefore you must learn Python. That is our motto.
Install Python 3.6 here and find its documentation here
Verify that Python 3 and PIP are installed correctly by opening your terminal/command line editor and running
python --version
and
pip --version
Hopefully, these both show the version of Python3 you just installed. If not, try
python3 --version
and
pip3 --version
Jupyter Notebook allows us to run Python and Tensorflow interactively in a web browser. If you are without it, please follow the basic installation instructions here.
If the install is successful, you should be able to open a "notebook" in your browser by executing the following command in your terminal/command line prompt (if you are on Windows you should use the Anaconda prompt)
You have the option of video, jupyter notebook or both together to take the lesson. However, you'll probably learn best, at least the first time, by coding along with the video lesson from an empty jupyter notebook.
| Section | Video |
|---|---|
| Introduction | 0 |
| Basic operations | 1 |
| Data types and conversion | 2 |
| Packages and modules | 3 |
| Reading and writing files | 4 |
| Numpy and Matplotlib | 5 |
Note that we are using the term familiarity, and not something like "mastery". There are 2 points: the 1st is that you will get better as you go along, so be patient with yourself if you don't understand it all at once. In fact, if you are new to this it would be very surprising if you did. The 2nd point is to remind yourself of the 1st point.
Also, it doesn't matter, at least to me, whether you are good at math, bad at math, can't sleep at night because of math - don't worry. Programming is also a language, and language is for everyone.