Course info

Rating

(3153)

Level

Intermediate

Updated

Sep 26, 2017

Duration

5h 11m

Description

Python Fundamentals gets you started with Python, a dynamic language popular for web development, big data, science, and scripting. What’s so great about Python? Python is powerful. The Python language is expressive and productive, it comes with a great standard library, and it’s the center of a huge universe of wonderful third-party libraries. With Python you can build everything from simple scripts to complex applications, you can do it quickly, and you can do it with fewer lines of code than you might think possible. But for many people those reasons take back-seat to something more important: Python is fun! Python’s readable style, quick edit-and-run development cycle, and “batteries included” philosophy mean that you can sit down and enjoy writing code rather than fighting compilers and thorny syntax. As your experiments become prototypes and your prototypes become products, Python makes the experience of writing software not just easier but truly enjoyable. In the words of Randall Munroe, "Come join us! Programming is fun again!"

About the author

Austin is a founding director of Sixty North, a software consulting,
training, and application development company. He's a native of Texas
but currently lives in Norway where he writes software, runs a local
software interest group, and presents and teaches whenever he can.

More from the author

About the author

Robert Smallshire is a founding director of Sixty North, a software product and consulting business in based in Norway. He has held several senior software architecture and technical management roles, and he is a regular conference speaker. Python is his weapon of choice.

More from the author

Section Introduction Transcripts

Introduction to the Python Fundamentals CourseWelcome to Python Fundamentals. My name is Austin Bingham and over the coming modules myself and Robert Smallshire will guide you through the basics of the Python programming language. Python is a big language, and a single course can't possibly cover everything there is to know, but this course will serve you well as a solid foundation for becoming productive with Python. Python Fundamentals is the first in our trilogy of three Pluralsight courses which cover the core Python language. This course serves as the foundation for our Python - Beyond the Basics and Advanced Python courses. Our courses follow a thoughtfully designed spiral curriculum. We visit the same or closely related topics several times in increasing depth, sometimes multiple times in the same course. For example, later in Python Fundamentals, we will cover classes and single inheritance. In Python - Beyond the Basics, we cover multiple class inheritance. In the Advanced Python course, we cover what amounts to a type of virtual inheritance using Python's sophisticated abstract base class mechanism. In Python Fundamentals, we'll cover basic techniques you'll use constantly on your journey with Python. Starting in this module, we'll give a high-level overview of the Python language, what it is, and what's so great about it. We'll also give a bird's-eye view of the rest of this course so that you'll have an idea of what's to come.

Strings and CollectionsHi. My name is Austin Bingham. Welcome to the second module of the Python Fundamentals course, which is about strings, collections, and iteration with for-loops. Python includes a rich selection of collection types, which are often completely sufficient for even quite intricate programs without resorting to defining our own data structures. We'll give enough of an overview of some fundamental collection types now, enough to allow us to write some interesting code. We'll also be revisiting each of these collection types together with a few additional ones later in the course. Let's start with these types str, bytes, list, and dict. Along the way we'll also cover Python's for-loops.

ModularityHello. My name is Robert Smallshire. Welcome to the third module of the Python Fundamentals course, which is about the structure and organization, or modularity, of Python programs. Modularity is an important property for anything but trivial software systems as it gives us the power to make self-contained, reusable pieces, which can be combined in new ways to solve different problems. As with most programming languages, the most fine-grained modularization facility is the definition of reusable functions. Collections of related functions are typically grouped into source code files called modules. Modules can be used from other modules, so long as we take care not to introduce a circular dependency. As we have seen already, we can import modules into the REPL, and we'll show you how modules can be executed directly as programs or scripts. Along the way, we'll investigate the Python execution model to ensure you have a good understanding of exactly when code is evaluated and executed. We'll round off by showing you how to use command line arguments to get basic configuration data into your program and make your program executable. To illustrate this module, we'll be taking the code snippet for retrieving words from a web-hosted text document we developed at the end of the previous session and organizing it into a fully-fledged Python module.

CollectionsHi. My name is Robert Smallshire. Welcome to the fifth module of the Python Fundamentals course where we look in more depth at the built-in collection types of the Python language and explore the various protocols that unite them. In this module we'll revisit some collection types we've already explored: Str or string, the immutable sequence of Unicode codepoints; list, the mutable sequence of objects; and dict, the mutable mapping from immutable keys to mutable objects. We'll also cover some new ones: Tuple, the immutable sequence of objects; range for arithmetic progressions of integers; and set, a mutable collection of unique immutable objects. We won't cover the bytes type further here. We've already discussed its essential differences with str, and most of what we learned about str can also be applied to bytes. This is not an exhaustive list of Python collection types, but it's completely sufficient for the overwhelming majority of Python 3 programs you'll encounter in the wild or are likely to write yourself. In this module we'll be covering these collections in this order, and then round off with an overview of the protocols that unite these collections, which allow them to be used in consistent and predictable ways. First up is tuple.

Handling exceptionsHello. My name is Austin Bingham. Welcome to the sixth module of the Python Fundamentals course where we introduce exception handling techniques. Exception handling is a mechanism for stopping normal program flow and continuing at some surrounding context or code block. The event of interrupting normal flow is called the act of raising an exception. In some enclosing context the raise exception must be handled upon which control flow if transferred to the exception handler. If an exception propagates up the call stack to the start of the program, then an unhandled exception will cause the program to terminate. And exception object containing information about where and why an exceptional event occurred is transported from the point at which the exception was raised to the exception handler so that the handler can interrogate the exception object and take appropriate action. If you've used exceptions in other popular imperative languages like C++ or Java, then you've already got a good idea of how exceptions work in Python. There have been long and tiresome debates over exactly what constitutes an exceptional event, the core issue being that exceptionality is in reality a matter of degree, some things are more exceptional than others, whereas programming languages impose a false dichotomy by insisting that an event is entirely exceptional or not at all exceptional. The Python philosophy is at the liberal end of the spectrum when it comes to the use of exceptions. Exceptions are ubiquitous in Python, and it's crucial to understand how to handle them.

IterablesHello. My name is Robert Smallshire. Welcome to the seventh module of the Python Fundamentals course where we'll cover comprehensions, iterable objects and iterators, lazy evaluation with generators, and various tools included with Python for working with iterable objects.

ClassesHello. My name is Austin Bingham. Welcome to the eighth module of the Python Fundamentals course. Here we'll cover classes, Python's tools for creating new types. You can get a long way in Python using the built-in scaler and collection types. For many problems, the built-in types and those available in the Python Standard library are completely sufficient. Sometimes though they aren't quite what's required, and the ability to create custom types is where classes come in. As we've seen, all objects in Python have a type, and when we report that type using the type built-in function, the result is couched in terms of class. Classes are a means of defining the structure and behavior of objects at the time we create the object. Generally speaking, the type of an object is fixed throughout its lifetime. As such, classes act as a sort of template or pattern according to which new objects are constructed. The class of an object controls its initialization in which attributes and methods are available through the object. For example, on a string object the methods we can use on that object such as split are defined in the str class. Classes are a key piece of machinery for object-oriented programming, and although it's often true that OOP is useful for making complex problems more tractable, it also commonly has the effect of making the solution to simple problems unnecessarily complex. A great thing about Python is that it's highly object oriented without forcing you to deal with classes until you really need them. This sets the language starkly apart from Java and C#.