pycar

Resources

Get your machine ready

• How to install Python 3 on Mac and Windows machines. (If you want to dabble in Python 2.7 on a Mac, just find your terminal and type ‘python’).
• virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper, for keeping your projects sandboxed in an easy to manage way. Here’s one good tutorial and another.
• Install iPython by typing pip3 install ipython for the souped-up interactive interpreter.
• version control with git and Github

Keep Practicing

Try our “PyCAR basics” iPython notebook to continue exploring data types and simple methods. Tony DeBarros also taught a fantastic class at NICAR on getting started with Python.

Here’s a great cheatsheet for basic python types and functions. And you should probably bookmark this fun and handy graphic of common Python errors. It’s worth your time to take a look at Tony DeBarros’ Python snippets, scripts for common tasks he’s found useful. Have Unicode problems? Check out this great video from Pycon 2014.

Good libraries to explore

• csv, for working with the best tabular data format.
• The re library for matching text with regular expressions.
• requests, a library for more easily making requests to web urls. One good tutorial and another.
• BeautifulSoup, for parsing html or xml, with a gentle introduction and another tutorial.
• mechanize. A tutorial with its own cheat sheet
• json. Work with json like it’s a dictionary.
• SQLite3. Use the easy, built-in SQLite database engine.
• peewee, an orm that lets you do your SQL in Python.
• python-twitter is good for interacting with the Twitter API.
• Xlrd. Do your Excel in Python.
• pandas, for data analysis. pandas’ dataframe object is like a table.
• And a cool collection of quick overviews on standard library modules. http://pymotw.com/2/contents.html

Support

Want advice on debugging? This blog post on two young girls learning to code is a very cool introduction to how to debug a program. There’s also a good post on thinking about debugging programs in general from the community behind p5.js. And we have this cheatsheet for how to read your Python error messages.

As we said in the class, with this mini boot camp, you get a lifetime support guarantee from us & PythonJournos

This site is open source. Improve this page.