Introducing Python¶
Although we are big fans of AI coding assistants, we also believe that it is important to understand the fundamentals of programming. You cannot trust or debug AI-generated code if you don’t know how to write code that does what you want. In this chapter, we will introduce the basic concepts of programming in Python. We will start with the basics of Python syntax, and then move on to more advanced topics like data types, flow control, and reading and writing data files. We will introduce AI assitance at the start of the next chapter.
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
understand and use variables
work with common Python data types like integers, floats, strings, characters, lists, dictionaries, as well as pandas DataFrames
use basic flow control, including for loops and conditionals
read data from text files
obtain basic summary statistics from data files
manipulate and extract data from pandas DataFrames
write Python code according to standard style guidelines