Python Programming 1

Session 1: GETTING STARTED 

• About Python 
• Python versions 
• Python documentation 
• Python runtimes 
• Installing Python 
• The REPL shell 
• Python editors 

Session 2: PYTHON SCRIPTS & SYNTAX 

• Script naming 
• Comments 
• Docstring 
• Statements 
• The backslash 
• Code blocks 
• Whitespace 
• Console IO (to enable the writing of simple programs) 
• A first Python program 
• Script execution 

Session 3: VARIABLES & DATA TYPES 

• Literals 
• Identifiers 
• Assignment 
• Numbers (bool, int, float, complex) 
• Binary, octal, and hexadecimal numbers 
• Floating point accuracy 
• Collections (str, list, tuple, set, dict) 
• None 
• Implicit and explicit type conversion (casting) 
• The type function 

Session 4: OPERATORS & EXPRESSIONS 

• Arithmetic Operators 
• Assignment Operators 
• Comparison Operators 
• Logical Operators 
• Membership Operators 
• Bitwise Operators  
• Identity Operators 

Session 5: CONDITIONS & LOOPS  

• Conditional statements (if, elif, else) 
• Nested conditional statements 
• Short hand if/if else 
• Python's alternative to the ternary operator 
• Iterative statements (while, for, else) 
• The range function 
• Iterating over a list 
• Break 
• Continue 
• Nested conditional/iterative statements 

Session 6: FUNCTIONS 

• Declaration 
• Invocation 
• Default values for parameters 
• Named arguments 
• args and kwargs 
• Returning multiple values 
• None returned  
• Variable scope 
• Masking and shadowing 
• The pass keyword 
• Recursive functions 

Session 7: OBJECTS AND CLASSES 

• About objects 
• Attributes and the dot notation 
• The dir function 
• Dunder attributes 
• Mutability 
• The id function 
• Pass by reference 
• Introduction to Classes 
• Class Declaration and Instantiation 
• Data attributes 
• Methods 
• Composition 

Session 8: LISTS  

• About lists 
• List syntax including slicing 
• Getting and setting list elements 
• Iterating over a list 
• Checking for the presence of a value 
• The len function 
• List methods incl. append, insert, remove, pop, clear, copy, sort, reverse etc. 
• The del keyword 
• Appending to and combining lists 
• List comprehension 

Session 9: TUPLES 

• About tuples 
• Tuple syntax 
• Getting tuple elements including unpacking 
• Iterating over a tuple 
• Checking for the presence of a value 
• The len function 
• Appending to and combining tuples 

Session 10: SETS 

• About Sets 
• Dictionary syntax 
• Creating, adding and removing set elements 
• Iterating over a set 
• Membership Testing 
• Sorting 
• Copying 
• Set methods incl. union, intersection, difference, symmetric_difference etc. 

Session 11: DICTIONARIES 

• About dictionaries 
• Dictionary syntax 
• Getting and setting dictionary elements 
• Iterating over a dictionary (keys, values, and items) 
• Checking for the presence of a key 
• The len function 
• Dictionary methods incl. keys, values, items, get, pop, popitem, clear etc. 
• The del keyword 
• Dictionary comprehension 

Session 12: STRINGS 

• About strings 
• String syntax including slicing 
• Escape characters 
• Triple-quoted strings 
• Concatenation 
• Placeholders 
• The format method 
• Other methods e.g. endswith, find, join, lower, replace, split, startswith, strip, upper etc. 
• A string as a list of bytes 

Session 13: MODULES & PACKAGES 

• About modules 
• Inbuilt modules math, random and platform 
• the dir() and help() functions 
• Creating and using modules 
• the __pycache__ and the .pyc files 
• The module search path 
• Importing modules 
• Namespaces 
• Importing module objects 
• The import wildcard 
• Aliases 
• Importing within a function 
• Executable modules 
• Reloading a module 
• About packages 
• Importing packaged modules 
• Importing packaged module objects  
• Package initialisation 
• Subpackages 
• Referencing objects in sibling packages 
• The Standard Library 
• Installing modules and packages using pip 

Session 14: PATTERN MATCHING 

• About regular expressions 
• Regular expression special characters 
• Raw strings 
• About the re module 
• re module functions incl. match, search, findall, full match, split, sub 

Session 15: EXCEPTION HANDLING 

• About exceptions and exception handling 
• Handling exceptions (try, except, else, finally) 
• Exception types 
• The exception object 
• Raising exceptions 
• Custom exception types 
• Built-in exceptions hierarchy 

Session 16: FILES & THE FILESYSTEM 

• The open function 
• Methods for seeking (seekable, seek) 
• Methods for reading from a file (readable, read, readline, readlines) 
• Iterating over a file 
• Methods for writing to a file (writable, write, writelines) 
• Introduction to context managers 
• Text encoding schemes, codepoints, codespace 
• ASCII and UNICODE (UTF schemes) 
• UTF-8, binary and hexadecimal representations 
• The ord() and chr() functions 
• Binary files, bytes and bytearray 
• I/O layered abstraction. 
• About the os module 
• os module functions incl. getcwd, listdir, mkdir, chdir, remove, rmdir etc. 
• OSError numbers and the errno module 

Session 17: DATABASES 

• The DB-API 
• DP-API implementations 
• Establishing a connection 
• Creating a cursor 
• Executing a query 
• Fetching results 
• Transactions 
• Inserting, updating, and deleting records