Welcome to the Practical Python Course

Let me take you on a quick journey into the wonderful features of the Python programming language. This course is not meant to be complete in regards of all the possible options Python has to offer. The aim is more to quickly develop to a point where simple day to day tasks, such as handling, analyzing and visualising data can be done quite simply and intuitive.

So we won’t cover all the details of every possible aspects of the Python language here. Most usually no possible pitfalls will be shown. Neither will approaches be addressed that look good at first glance, but have something in them, that lets Python fail to execute it. The sort of “is this valid Python source code?”

The approach here will more be focussing on usual patterns for achieving goals. When studying Python source code a lot, you will at some point recognize that to solve a problem most usually one single approach is used, although there would have been a dozen possible of them. Often there is that one single well approved strategy that is used over and over again, which turns out to be effective, readable and accepted by many to be the solution for the problem. This is what we will be looking at.

Note

When it comes to performance aspects of source code, things may change. To get the most out of your code to solve a problem as quickly as possible, those accepted strategies might vary, and guide you to the nifty internals of Python. That should however not be the focus straight away. It’s always a good idea to get the thing running algorithmically first.