Brayden Smith Smith - Python Programming Crash Course: A Smarter and Faster Beginner’s Step by Step Guide to Learn Python Programming with Practical Exercises, Interview Questions, and Tips and Tricks

Python Programming Crash Course

A Smarter and Faster Beginners Step by Step Guide to Learn Python Programming with Practical Exercises, Interview Questions, and Tips and Tricks

Brayden Smith & Hein Smith

Copyright 2019 By Brayden Smith & Hein Smith- All rights reserved.

The content contained within this book may not be reproduced, duplicated or transmitted without direct written permission from the author or the publisher.

Under no circumstances will any blame or legal responsibility be held against the publisher, or author, for any damages, reparation, or monetary loss due to the information contained within this book, either directly or indirectly.

Legal Notice:

This book is copyright protected. It is only for personal use. You cannot amend, distribute, sell, use, quote or paraphrase any part, or the content within this book, without the consent of the author or publisher.

Disclaimer Notice:

Please note the information contained within this document is for educational and entertainment purposes only. All effort has been executed to present accurate, up to date, reliable, complete information. No warranties of any kind are declared or implied. Readers acknowledge that the author is not engaging in the rendering of legal, financial, medical or professional advice. The content within this book has been derived from various sources. Please consult a licensed professional before attempting any techniques outlined in this book.

By reading this document, the reader agrees that under no circumstances is the author responsible for any losses, direct or indirect, that are incurred as a result of the use of the information contained within this document, including, but not limited to, errors, omissions, or inaccuracies.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Thank you for purchasing this book! I hope that we can teach you enough in this book to get started with Python programming.

The good thing about Python is that its very easy to learn. In all the years of computer science, this has been something that was missing from most languages and systems. While there were some languages that were relatively simple, and offering a path for beginners such as BASIC and Pascal, they seemed to be lacking. Unfortunately, this kept many people from taking up coding, which is turning out to be a more important skill as the years go by.

It is clear that as we continue forward in the information age that having some level of familiarity with coding is going to be an advantage. That doesnt mean that you have to be a full-blown computer scientist, but knowing coding puts you at a distinct advantage in todays world. We are just beginning to fully enter the world of data science and machine learning, and will soon be seeing a lot more from artificial intelligence.

Having some level of familiarity will help you no matter what career path you are pursuing. It opens up a world of simple modeling and even machine learning that you can easily implement using Python.

Python brings much of the power to your programming without having to go to a more sophisticated and cumbersome language. While it has object-oriented capabilities, Python also maintains a basic simplicity to the language that is, in some ways, reminiscent of BASIC, but at the same time, offering more power and sophistication.

Moreover, Python is a free tool that works across operating systems. There are no copyright issues to worry about with Python, and you can download and run Python on a Mac, a PC, or even on a Linux box.

Python is interpreted. In some applications, this can be a weakness, but with todays powerful CPUs that have high-speed chips along with large amounts of memory, this isnt an issue the way it was in the early days of BASIC. Since it's not converted into an object or machine code, this makes it portable between machines. If you are using Python to do some modeling at work, and you have a PC at work and a Mac at home (or vice versa), you can easily move your Python code from one machine to another without having to alter it in any way.

Compare this to mobile programming. If you are developing an application for the iPhone, you are going to have to use either the Swift programming language or objective-c. But if you want to make an Android version of your application, you are going to have to start from scratch. While the applications can share things such as data or images, the code itself will have to be written in Java and used with a completely different compiler. This adds a lot of extra work, time, and expense to the enterprise.

With Python, that is never an issue. You can copy your source code on one kind of computer and then open it on another, completely different kind of computer, and the local Python interpreter will run it for you. This can save a lot of time and headaches.

Python has become important in the realm of data science and machine learning. If these are areas of interest to you, then you should consider mastering Python. Many introductory treatments on machine learning are focused on using the Python language. In fact, it goes well beyond that, and you can even use Python to do many machine learning tasks. Some people may exclusively use Python for this purpose. Python can play a role as an instructional tool so that you can use Python to learn basic programming skills.

In this book, we are going to cover all of the basic skills that you need to learn how to use Python. We will begin by talking about setting up your environment and basic data types in Python. This will include the obligatory hello world program, where we learn how to enter a few simple statements and learn how to output information to the console. We will also learn how to enter comments in Python.

From here, we will learn about primitive types and keywords and then learn about lists and tuples, along with more complicated data structures like dictionaries and sets.

You cannot have a coding book without learning about control flow, and so we will talk about if statements, for loops, and while loops.

Later, well lay the foundations that you are going to need in order to use Python in more advanced treatments. We will learn how to handle exceptions, and also how to do File I/O. If you are going to be using Python for more advanced work such as machine learning, then this is going to be important because, without data to read or output, you arent going to get much out of machine learning.

We will also learn how to set up functions and subroutines and how to pass data to them. Then we will talk about classes and inheritance. The tools of object-oriented programming remain very important to this day, and frankly, they are not going anywhere.

If nothing else, learning Python can prove to be a springboard to more complicated and advanced languages.