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What we'll learn
You'll learn three things at the same time so don't get discouraged if it feels a bit much at the start. Everybody's issues will be in these three different domains and at the beginning it can be difficult to differentiate between them. Keep this in mind, everybody has to go through this stage and the click comes at different times for different people but everybody clicks at some point! The three new things you'll learn:
- the concepts of programming, most notably Object Orientated Programming (OOP)
- the syntax of one particular language, in our case Python3
- the tools needed to start programming in our language of choice
Within each of these topics there are subtopics but there are not bottomless! Below is a small overview of how I would subdivide them.
Concepts
The subtopics behind the concept of programming can be sliced (in no particular order) as follows:
- objects
- variables
- conditional logic
- functions
- loops
The concept behind these topics are the same in most languages, it's just how you write them that is different. This how is part of the syntax of the language.
Syntax
In computer science, the syntax of a computer language is the set of rules that defines the combinations of symbols that are considered to be correctly structured statements or expressions in that language. This applies both to programming languages, where the document represents source code, and to markup languages, where the document represents data. The syntax of a language defines its surface form.[1] Text-based computer languages are based on sequences of characters,
The quote above is taken shamelessly from wikipedia.
Tools
Writing code
Scripts are text files, plain and simple. So in order to write a Python3 script all we need is a text editor. Nano, vim, notepad++ all do a good job of editing plain text files but some make it easier than others. You've noticed that vim colors the code of a shell script no? One of the many features of an IDE is syntax highlighting. It colors things such as keywords which makes our life so much nicer when writing code. We'll come back to these features in a bit.
Running code
In order to run Python3 code you need the Python3 interpreter. This is because when you execute your script, the interpreter will read and execute each line of the text file line by line.
Most people who want to write and run Python3 code, or any language for that matter, will install an Integrated Development Environment to do so. There are no rules as to what has to be included for a program to qualify as an IDE but in my opinion they should include:
- syntax highlighting
- autocomplete
- goto commands such as goto definition, goto declaration, goto references
- automatic pair opening and closing
- builtin help navigation
There is a plethora of IDE's available and you can't really make a wrong choice here, but to make the overall learning curve a bit less steep we'll start out with a user friendly IDE, pycharm.
The python3 shell
TODO animated overview of the shell and the world of OOP
Installing pycharm
TODO
Your first project
TODO helloworld
How to execute
- within pycharm
- from the command line
Simple printing
String formatting
String replacement
Taking input
TODO say hello program
Functions can return something
Taking input and evaluation
TODO say hello plus ask for age
- slightly insist on blocking nature of
input()
Conditional logic
- introduction to
if,elifandelse
Class string methods
Coding challenge - Celsius to Fahrenheit converter
A text based adventure game
TODO mini text based adventure game to point out the complexity of conditional logic and flow control
Creating your own functions
Functions that do something
TODO recipe with variable flavor (chocolate, vanilla, ...) TODO pretty_print
Variable scope
Functions that return something
TODO basic math functions
Using the standard library
TODO import random exercise (digital dice) TODO import datetime exercise (will it be Sunday) TODO simple ROT13 cryptography with multiple libs
Coding challenge - Memento Mori calculator
Writing your first library
TODO import pretty print and digital dice
What are libraries?
How do we write libraries?
What is __name__ == "__main__"?
Anatomy of a program
TODO imports, functions, execution
While loop
TODO guess the number exercise
Lists
Creating lists
Picking elements
Slicing lists
For loop
TODO say hello to my friends exercise
Coding challenge - Cheerleader chant
TODO nested for loop exercise
Handling files
Reading from a file
Writing to a file
csv, JSON and yaml
pickle
Coding challenge - Login generator
TODO write a login generator as a library with a cli as program BONUS argparse, save to file, read from file
Dictionaries as data containers
TODO adapt the login generator to output a dict
Creating our own classes
Class examples
TODO simple animal or vehicle exercise TODO task manager
Class inheritance
TODO shapes and surfaces TODO superhero game
Improve the login generator
TODO convert the login generator to a class
Infinite programs
- insist on the nature of scripts we did up until now
Logic breakdown of a simple game
TODO hangman exercise
Trivial pursuit multiple choice game
TODO db
Introduction to the requests library
Threading
TODO add a countdown timer to the multiple choice game