aoml/archive/2122/other/python_prep_guidelines.md

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# Python prep guidelines
On lecture 1, I informed you that you will be writing Python code as part of
the 3 cases you will need to go through in this course. This means that, the
more you know about Python, the less you will need to focus on *how* to do
things with Python and the *more* you will be able to focus on actually solving
the case.
This preparation is specially important if you have never done any coding. I
highly advise you to take your time to work your Python skills out before case
1 begins. It will pay off down the line.
This document contains two sections: a summary of the skills you are looking
for, and a few suggested contents that can help you. You don't need to use
suggested contents: if you find others that you prefer, go ahead. I do
recommend that you stick to trying to learn the skills I am suggesting, since
that will maximize the return on your effort. There are many other areas of
Python that you can learn but won't be relevant for this course.
## Skills to look for
- Notebooks and Colab
- How to use your UPF gmail to open
Colab (https://colab.research.google.com)
- How to create a new notebook, write code in it and run it
- How to upload and download CSV or Excel files in Colab notebooks
- Python basics
- Variables
- Functions
- Basic data types: ints, floats, strings
- Complex data types: lists, dicts, tuples
- Pandas
- Understanding pandas dataframes
- How to read and write CSV/Excel files as dataframes
- How to select data
- Selecting columns
- Selecting rows with conditions
- Grouping and aggregating dataframes
- Obtaining statistics from columns
- Creating new columns through operations on existing columns
- Seaborn
- Understaning seaborn plots
- How to plot data from a pandas dataframe with seaborn
## Suggested Materials
- A super brief Colab example
notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/?utm_source=scs-index
- A more detailed, high quality example Colab
notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/github/cs231n/cs231n.github.io/blob/master/python-colab.ipynb
- A brief video intro to Colab (
Spanish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VFYs3Ot_aA
- Another brief video intro to Colab (
English): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCngVVBSsmA
- A free, 4 hours intro to Python from
Datacamp: https://www.datacamp.com/courses/intro-to-python-for-data-science
- A self-pace introduction to Python for STEM
applications: https://www.pythonlikeyoumeanit.com/index.html
- A huge collection of resources, in case you don't like the previous ones or
want to find more: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/wiki/index