Learn Python

This represents my extensive and continually growing set of notes for learning the Python programming language. I use these notes extensively with my students and they are frequently updated. I welcome your feedback or suggestions on how they may be improved.

Supplemental to these notes, I have a range of Python videos on Youtube.

Get Python

Download and install Python from https://python.org. Run IDLE on your computer (recommended). Open your Windows Start menu, scroll down to "P", and open the Python sub menu, select the program called "IDLE" – make sure the version of Python starts with a 3.

Alternatively, use one of the online Python editors such as https://repl.it or https://trinket.io. These will allow you to try it out without installing anything on your computer.

The basics

This is the place to start if you are brand new to Python. I have introdutory videos, extensive review notes and practice problem sets to assist you on your programming journey.

1. Variables and numbers
2. Strings and casting
3. Truth, if, else and while
4. Lists and for-loops
5. Functions
6. Files
7. Exceptions
8. Dates and times
9. Dictionaries

After you have completed the lessons, feel free to make use of my Python basics reference for beginners PDF that serves as a summary of the above topics.

Beyond the basics

If you know the basics of Python and wish to experiement with a new package or technique, look through the other tutorials to find something of interest to you.

• Arduino
• Audio (recording, playback, detect frequency etc)
• Circuit Python for Adafruit Circuit Playground Express and compatible boards
• Classes (object orientated programming)
• Databases
• Excel reading & chart generation (pandas, matplotlib)
• Flask: Introduction
  • Flask: Add Google Auth
  • Flask: Deploy to Google App Engine (external article)
  • Flask: Deploy to Debian Nginx
• Google searching (through the API)
• Graphs, generate
• GUI with TKinter
• GUI with Chromium
• Kivy for building iOS and Andriod apps
• Lego EV3
• Networking with sockets
• Numpy
• OpenCV face detection
• PIL (Python image library)
• Publish a package to PyPi
• Pygame
• PyInstaller (create EXE files)
• QR Codes
• Requests
• Slack social platform
• Telegram social platform
• Text to speech
• Threading
• Turtle
• venv (Virtual Environments)
• Web scraping with beautifulsoap4
• Windows services howto
• Youtube downloading

Installing packages

# On the Mac 
sudo python3 -m pip install amazing_package
# On Windows
python -m pip install amazing_package

Author

(C) Paul Baumgarten 2019