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A hands on and practical introduction to programming and python development.

The purpose of this workshop is to introduce some fundamental concepts of software development. We will be using the python programming language, which provides a readable, powerful syntax that is used by data scientists, web developers, even NASA engineers! In particular, our aspiration in this workshop is to work up to a point where we can confidently and feasibly level up our python knowledge without external support from anyone.

Here is a list of concepts we definitely expect to cover today.

• Basic data types of Python
• Basic data structures of Python
• Boolean relationships in Python
• Using loops and functions in Python to do repeatable tasks

Here is a list of concepts we hope to introduce today.

• Web Scraping with Python
• Intro to Data Science with Python

We will not be covering the following concept in this lecture.

• How run Python scripts in the Jupyter Notebook ecosystem

Here's the general game plan for the day.

Before we get into writing our code, we will have to install a few programs and tools. It may take about a half hr to pull off but ultimately a properly established development environment will pay off in spades as we navigate the rest of our day.

We will begin by exploring some of the basics of the python programming language. For example, how can we keep track of data in python?

In this section we will consider a core concept in programming: functions. Some questions we will answer: How does decision making work? Can we automate functionality so that we don't have to repeat ourselves?

Complex data and situations in real life can be modeled in python using data structures that are a bit more complex than the basic data types we previously covered. Here, we will discuss looping and modeling real world data in a "pythonic" manner.

What makes python super useful is the existence of an ecosystem of code written by others and distributed for us to use - for free! We will explore how these items can be used to enhance our code.

Here we will apply what we have learned about the basics of python to do more useful things in terms of data accumulation. Specifically, we will look into how we can harvest data that might be useful for processing from online sources: webpages and publicly available APIs.

And finally, now that we have regular, easily grokkable information - how can we do useful things with it? What tools do we have at our disposal to easily make sense of the data we have accumulated?

Thank you!

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Hello, Wrold! I'm Taq, Senior Software Engineer at Intersection. Prior to IxN, I was Director of Engineering at Honey, a beautiful social intranet. I've taught Front-end Web Development at GA 15x (so far). I was formerly an Adjunct Professor at King's College, where I taught an intro to web development class. Currently, I'm teaching a bootcamp at Pursuit, the non-profit based in Queens. In the past, I've taught some form of coding at institutions such as C4Q, The Startup Institute, NYCDA, One Month and Columbia Splash. When I'm not working I am usually thinking about math, building software, or working on hardware hacks.