1. Introduction: Introduction
Goals
The main goal of this course is to enable you to use Python's basic functionality and bend it to fit your own needs. We try to accomplish this within three chapters, in which we will discuss the Python type hierarchy in greater detail.
The Python type hierarchy describes all the internal type classes of the Python language. The items in grey will not be discussed in this course, as they are rarely used in real world applications.
In chapter Basic Types, we will show how to use and manipulate Python's most basic data structures.
In chapter Control Flow, we will focus on the structure of programs and how to control it with key programming concepts, such as if-statements and loops.
In chapter Data Structures, we examine more powerful and thus more complex datatypes, like lists and tuples.
The course will not go into modularity, how to import and use a subset of external and internal modules that can introduce a lot of new functionality to the language, nor will we discuss use cases and other practical applications. Nonetheless, the course will show you how useful and powerful Python can be, even on a smaller scale.
At the end of this course
- you will have a complete understanding of the most relevant basic and complex built-in datatypes included in the Python programming language and their corresponding methods, and are able to use these in code;
- you are able to structure code using conditionals, loops and function definitions to suit your needs;
- you will have an idea of how to use all basic Python functionality discussed to write concise algorithms that solve common problems.
Most concepts you will learn in this course translate to other programming languages, allowing you to adopt them much easier.
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