March 13, 2019
Intro to Python Programming
Tutorial – 01
Youtube – Learn Python 3 for Machine Learning & Web Development [2019]
By: Programming with Mosh
Progress
End Time: 29:35
Next Part of Tutorial: Strings
NOTES
This tutorial covers the complete basics of Python, starting with installing it, so it is as beginner friendly as you can get. The entire tutorial will use these basic foundational teachings to lead into creating projects to show how to use what you learn in a functional sense. These projects include a shopping site, an AI system for helping a user get music to match their preference, and a spreadsheet processing program.
Upon installation, it was important to “Add Python to PATH” for Windows (which I am using). I wasn’t sure if I did that since I had installed before, so I found that this references the Path in environment variables and just adds the path of your Python folder to this list. I added my Python path to this list in hopes that would resolve that issue. The tutorial says this is critical to follow it, so I will see if I get any errors.
Next we grabbed a code editor. The suggested one to use was PyCharm. There were no special installation features or plugins mentioned to download/install so I just installed the bare minimum.
In Python, you can define a string with single or double quotes. You can also multiply a string with a number to print that string that number of times (i.e. ‘*’ * 10 gives **********).
Standard variable types:
- int: integer values
- float: floating point values (those with decimal points)
- string: words/text
- bool: true/false
- lists
- objects
Next we finally got into receiving input from the user. This uses a Python function simply called Input(). The input from the user for this will also initially be created as a string variable, so make sure to convert this to int, float, etc. for your needs.
TERMINOLOGY
- Expression: a piece of code that produces a value
- Variable: allocation of memory for a specified value
SUMMARY
So far the basics seem very similar to what I’ve already learned in C++/C#, with the standard variable types and simple functions. I am speeding through these early parts, but don’t want to jump ahead since I want to make sure I don’t miss anything that does happen to differentiate from what I already know. This is also a good refresher for basic programming terminology and getting another view on the underlying basics of coding.