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Syllabus
Syllabus:
UW continuing Education Program for EMC/Isilon, Inc.
Wednesdays 6 - 9 pm: Jun 20th to Sept 5th (10 Sessions)
- Starting Wednesday June 20th (10 Sessions)
- No class July 4th
- No class August 15th
- Final class September 5th
NOTE: in the spirit of the dynamic nature of Python, the Syllabus (and the class) will be a dynamic document -- evolving as the class progresses. The general structure is fixed, but the details will change.
Christopher Barker, PhD. ([email protected]) is an oceanographer and software developer currently working for NOAA in Seattle. He first began programming over 30 years ago, and has been using programming to solve problems in science and engineering ever since. He has been using Python as his primary language since 1998. Chris gives numerous presentations on his work at professional conferences, and teaches oceanography and oil spill modeling at regular workshops. He has been involved with the Seattle Python Interest Group (www.seapig.org) for many years, and has given a number of talks and tutorials at SEAPIG meetings, as well as the PyCon and Scipy conferences. He is an active participant in a number Python-related open source communities, and has served as a Google Summer of Code mentor for the wxPython project.
There are two main supported versions of Python: the 2.* series and the 3.* series (py3k). In this class we will be using "cPython" version 2.7, the version distributed by python.org. Each student is expected to have access to a computer with python 2.7 and a decent programming text editor installed, both during class and for homework assignments.
This class assumes a basic knowledge of programming. Thus I will try to emphasize what is unique about Python, with less focus on general programing concepts.
One learns programming by doing -- I'll be demonstrating as I talk about concepts, and I will pause frequently to give you a chance to try things out, so plan on having a laptop up and running with python and your text editor of choice.
There will be weekly homework assignments. They will usually be flexible to allow for student's varying time constants. However, you learn by doing, so I do encourage you to put some time in to the homework. I will review your work, and do a mini code-review of selected assignments during class.
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
In addition, I will ask each student to identify a small project, ideally related to your work, that you can develop as a class project -- that project will be the primary homework for the last few classes.
Each class will be broken down something like this:
- 30 minutes talk
- 30 minutes exercises
- 5 minute lightning talk
- 25 minutes talk
- 30 minutes exercises
- 5 minute lightning talk
- 25 minutes talk
- 30 minutes exercises
(there will be no official breaks, but we should all feel free to move about during lab/exercise time)
The primary textbook comes in two versions: a printed book: Python for Software Design, and a free online version: Think Python.
Despite the different titles, the two versions have the same contents.
We also be making much use of: Learn Python the hard way, also available online and in a dead trees version.
There are many good books and resources online and in dead trees versions. A few notable ones:
- The "Official" Python docs:
- A good place to go for reference, and not a bad tutorial.
- Dive Into Python
- Dive Into Python is a getting pretty old and has not been updated for a good while -- nevertheless, there is a lot of good stuff in there.
- Python Essential Reference:
- The definitive reference for both Python and much of the standard library.
- Learning Python
- This was the best intro book back when I learned in 1999...
... and many others
June 20
June 27
July 11
July 18
July 25
August 1
August 8
August 22
August 29
September 5