This Course in a Nutshell

Aimed at Python beginners, this course will provide you a fundamental understanding of how to program in Python. Your journey will take you from a total Python beginner to an intermediate level Python developer more than ready to tackle your own professional projects.

This course will provide you the solid foundation you will need to continue moving forward in your Python development endeavors. This course is not a "here's how I do it, just type along please" type of course - its goal is to make you understand each and every line of code we are going to write together, why we write it and why it works, giving you the knowledge to apply the same coding techniques to your own situation and problems.

Like any good college level course, this course is fairly lengthy and will require time, not only for watching the videos, but also working on your own to explore the various topics, trying things out, and at the end of each section working on increasingly complex problems. It takes a certain amount of time to master a programming language, and this course is no exception. If you are looking for a quick and superficial intro to Python, then this course is probably not for you.

Course Overview

This course balances theory and coding practice. Most subjects are two-part: a theory (or lecture) video where we cover a specific topic, explain how things work, followed by a practice (or coding) video which takes the lecture material and applies it using real code. I highly encourage you to take notes during the lectures, and code along with me during the coding videos - that's the beauty of online videos - you can pause, rewind, speed up, slow down as you need!

All the course slides (over 900 of them!) are available for download if you prefer that approach over taking your own notes.

We use Jupyter notebooks as the perfect tool for teaching and learning Python.

Jupyter notebooks support both Python code as well as interspersed markdown documentation. You will find that every code video in this course has a corresponding Jupyter notebook available in the course downloads, that not only reproduces all the code we do in the coding videos, but is fully annotated with explanations of the code, basically what I cover in the coding videos, and sometimes more!

All the notebooks and the data files we will work with, are available in the course downloads in the first section of this course as well as in GitHub.

At the end of each section, you will find a set of exercises with solutions. It is imperative that you work through these exercises, and only move on to the next section once you are able to do these exercises on your own. Each section of this course builds on top of the previous one!