First we did introductions! I'm of course Soma, and most easily found on Twitter at @dangerscarf if you have questions about any of this. Longer inquiries can head on over to jonathan.soma@gmail.com.
A chat room for secretly whispering during class. To log in you can download Colloquy or Macs or mIRC for Windows machines. The room to join is #ledeprogram on chat.freenode.net.
Programming languages are the words and symbols that make computers Do Stuff. In the end they can all more or less do the exact same sorts of things, but some have more parenthesis or support for language processing or aren't based on English or all sorts of things.
JavaScript runs in your browser and is responsible for annoying pop-ups and neat interactive maps. It's being used on the server-side these days, too. (some notes on frontend vs backend)
Python, Perl, and Ruby are all scripting languages, which means they're good for writing quick small programs (pedants, please spare me). Don't get me wrong, they're also perfectly good for writing larger programs, it's just that they're exceptionally good at the small stuff. Perl has traditionally been the domain of sysadmins who take care of servers, Ruby is for hipsters† and web site backends, and Python is for number-crunching, language-processing, and academia. Repeat these stereotypes to people if you'd like to get yelled at.
Java and C++ are compiled languages, which run on servers and are much faster than scripting languages. They're a pain to write, though, and require a lot more curly braces than Python.
HTML and CSS are actually not programming languges! HTML is a markup language, which describes that certain parts of content are on the web (here is a title, here is a paragraph, etc), and CSS is a presentation language, which can make things change colors and get borders and be larger or smaller and fun stuff like that.
SQL, a.k.a. Structured Query Language is a language used to talk to databases. You'll learn it in Data & Databases!
We saw a lot of examples in class, checking out code that was unreadable & uncommented, unreadable & commented, readable & uncommented, and finally readable & commented.
Ignore the parts you don't know, and speak the ones you do know out loud. for filename in python_filenames: doesn't really mean anything in English but you can get the gist of it. It's just a foreign language - you probably don't know what aisukurimu means in Japanese, but if you listen to it and think a little it'll click.
If you end up with python_filenames = glob.glob('*.ipynb'), maybe you don't know what glob.glob means, but if someone's been naming their variables well you know what it ends up making for you: a bunch of python filenames.
People are really into the Zen of Python as a series of edicts about how to write Python, but it might just be too zen to be of any use. Just keep your code readable and add a lot of comments - that way you'll know what you were doing when you read your code weeks later!
Programming is all about Googling error messages, reading code that doesn't make sense, and crossing your fingers that you didn't forget a parenthesis. Every once in a while you type things, too. No matter what, though, the first step to being able to rock it is to not be too intimidated. Just think of it as a foreign language that doesn't have to be pronounced!
You all asked me about this a ton! Learn Python the Hard Way is the number one best (cheapskates can scroll until you see the free to read online link), but you can also check out the much-maligned-by-me Codecademy course.
My personally recommended way to learn is do whatever works.
First we did Hello world, because it's the law.
Then we talked about Python data types, which are much nicer than what that page seems to imply. str and int were the ones we started off with (strings and integers, respectively).
Error messages are your new best friend. Or at least they'll never leave you alone, and if you don't learn to love them you'll probably go insane. They also teach you how to Google and solve problems! The most popular one seems to be syntax errors, which usually means something was typed incorrectly.
Variables are handy bags to store your informaiton in. After saying name = "Soma" we can just use name all over the place instead of "Soma". As a result, something like name.upper() will give us "SOMA"!
We learned about using <shift>+<tab> to bring up docstrings, so we can try to figure out what the heck glob means. We also learned about using .+<tab> to get a list of methods we can use on an object. If nothing's coming up, run your code! If you're using it on name, for example, maybe IPython doesn't know what name is yet.
We also brushed up against methods and functions. Functions were roughly defined as len in len(name) and methods as the upper part of name.upper(). We learned you can pass arguments or parameters to them, like when we sent "a" to a method with "Soma".count("a").
Control structures showed their faces as if statements.
if cell['cell_type'] == "code":
print "I found a code cell"
elif cell['cell_type'] == "markdown":
print "I found a markdown cell"
else:
print "This was neither a code cell nor a markdown cell"Lists came up near the end, where we had [5, 2, 7] and tried to figure out how to count all those numbers up. We also talked about how to think about keeping running totals and writing pseudocode, which is sort of what the comments below are.
You can go through each element of a list using for x in y: - that's one of many types of loop. You indent everything that you'd like to do with that element, like so:
for filename in filenames:
# Indent what you're doing with your filename! Python is all about indentation.
print filenameYou can find most of that code right on over in Hello world.ipynb, and some more is just below.
# Open the file
total = 0
# Go through all the worksheets
# Count the number of lines of code
count = worksheet.lines_of_code
total = total + count
# Print the total number of lines of code
print totalFinding out what a list is, and sorting it
worksheets = [5, 2, 7,5,6,7,8,8]
type(worksheets)
worksheets.sort()
print worksheetsHow do you get the final element of a list? Math!
worksheets = [5, 2, 7,5,6,7,8,8,2,3,4,5]
worksheets[len(worksheets) - 1]Subscribe to the NICAR email list! It's like being in the friendlist computer-y newsroom on earth. Signup instructions are over here. You might want to set up a filter to mark it as read when it comes in, though, otherwise you'll think you got real popular.
Read a lot of angry online people being angry online about whether other people are programming in The Right Way, and if using Google makes you a horrible inhuman beast.