Python Tutorial : Hello Python!

Key Takeaways

hi my name is Hugo and I'll be your host for introduction to Python for data science I'm a data scientist and educator at data camp and host of the data frame podcast which you must check out in this course you will learn Python for data science through video lessons like this one and interactive exercises you get your own Python session where you can experiment and try to come up with the correct code to solve the instructions you're learning by doing while receiving customized and instant feedback on your work python was conceived by guido van rossum here you can see a photo of me with ghido what started as a hobby project soon became a general-purpose programming language nowadays you can use Python to build practically any piece of software but how did this happen well first of all python is open source it's free to use second it's very easy to build packages in Python which is code that you can share with other people to solve specific problems throughout time more and more of these packages specifically built for data science have been developed suppose you want to make some fancy visualizations of your company's sales there's a package for that or what about connecting to a database to analyze sensor measurements there's also a package for that people often refer to Python as the Swiss Army knife of programming languages as you can do almost anything with it in this course we'll start to build up your data science coding skills bit by bit so make sure to stick around to see how powerful the language can be currently there are two common versions of Python version 2.7 and 3.5 apart from some since tactical differences they are pretty similar but as support for version 2 will fade over time our courses focus on Python 3 to install python 3 on your own system follow the steps at this URL now that you're all eyes and ears for Python let's start experimenting I'll start with the Python shell a place where you can type Python code and immediately see the results in data camps exercise interface this shell is embedded here let's start off simple and use Python as a calculator let me type 4 plus 5 and hit enter python interprets what you typed and prints the result of your calculation 9 the Python shell that's used here is actually not the original one we're using ipython short for interactive Python which is some kind of juiced up version of regular Python that'll be useful later on ipython was created by Fernando Perez and is part of the broader Jupiter ecosystem apart from interactively working with Python you can also have Python run so called Python scripts these Python scripts are simply text files with the extension dot pi it's basically a list of Python commands that are executed almost as if you are typing the commands in the shell yourself line by line let's put the command from before in a script now which can be found here in data camps interface the next step is executing the script by clicking submit answer if you execute this script in the data camp interface there's nothing in the output pane that's because you have to explicitly use print inside scripts if you want to generate output during execution let's wrap our previous calculation in a print call and rerun the script this time the same output as before is generated great putting your code in Python scripts instead of manually retyping every step interactively will help you to keep structure and avoid retyping everything over and over again if you want to make a change you simply make the change in the script and rerun the entire thing now that you've got an idea about different ways of working with python i suggest you head over to the exercises use the ipython shell for experimentation and use the python script editor to code the actual answer if you click Submit answer your script will be executed and check for correctness get coding and don't forget to have fun