The Python language: fundamentals

Programme

Module 1 — Why Python

• The history of the language's development.
• Where Python is used.
• Tasks solved with the help of Python.
• PEP8 — the basic law in Python

Module 2 — Preparing the workplace

• Where to get the Python application.
• Installing the Python interpreter on various operating systems.
• Choosing a development environment. Today we choose an environment from Russia: OpenIDE or GIGAIde, free and open. We install the development environment.
• We connect Artificial Intelligence to the development environment — this will help us improve and speed up the project development process
• A brief overview of the development environment, the concept of project, sandbox, package and module.
• Navigating the project. Saving and restoring the project.
• Writing Hello World

Module 3 — Organising work on a Python project

• Using shared storage.
• Placing and restoring a project from storage using the development environment.
• Restoring a project from source files. Viewing the state of the local sandbox.
• Migrating a project to a new version of Python.

Module 4 — Python language basics

• Project, module and package variables, constants — naming rules based on PEP8 conventions.
• The start of an application — the __name__ variable and the if construct.
• Discussion of the main grammatical elements of the language described in the system module, indentation and line wrapping.
• Declaring variables, assigning values, defining simple and container variables.
• The main constructs of the Python language. Branching operators and loops.
• Introduction to exception handling.
• The concept of a block in Python.
• Outputting information to the console of a running application. Introduction to the logging mechanism in an application.

Module 5 — Main functions and objects

• Functions for working with numbers.
• Functions for working with strings. Using regular expressions.
• Functions for working with dates. Getting dates, converting, extracting the needed data from a date.
• Introduction to collections (lists, sets, dictionaries). For now the main focus is on lists.

Module 6 — Interaction with the outside world (file interaction)

• The resource block, opening and closing an operating system file, creating a new file with different access attributes.
• Reading and writing a text file, different encodings, converting encodings.
• The print function working with an external file, redirecting the error-handling stream to an external file.
• Generating reports with the print function.
• Working with a CSV file, loading data from a CSV file, defining CSV parsing rules using a dialect. Exporting data from Python to a CSV file.
• Python and the XML external data format. DOM parsing. Navigating an XML document and extracting data. Writing to an XML file.
• Python and the JSON format. Reading data from JSON files and writing variables to a JSON file.

Module 7 — User-defined functions in Python

• The syntax for creating a function. The function signature. Parameters and return values. Python has no concept of a procedure.
• Nested functions (local to a function).
• Passing parameters to functions: positional, keyword, default parameters, using an asterisk in parameter descriptions.
• The concept of a closure within a function, closed-over variables and functions.
• Lambda expressions, functions as parameters of functions (this is already advanced level).

Module 8 — Network interaction

• Access to an HTTP server, using additional libraries to work with requests to the server.
• Simple access to a database. Running queries on a database and exporting data to text files