Module 0: Python Tutorial

To-Do Date: Mar 28, 2022 at 11:59pm

Since we don’t want to limit the content of this course to students with programming experience, the first week and a half of this course will be time for you to complete our custom tutorial for the Python programming language.

Installing and Opening Python:

It’s worth noting that we’re in the process of updating the tutorial, but this has not been completed. However, since we won’t have class time to work through this, the introduction provides significantly more information on installing and opening Python than the previous version. Please go there if you need more support in those first steps. (Which is totally ok! That’s why we’re providing the update: the entry barrier for these tools can be steep, and we want to do everything we can to help.)

How to Approach the Python Tutorial:

To summarize the more extended remarks in the tutorial, we believe that modern scientists need to be able to have some idea of how their computers work. Programming is the act of communicating with your computer to do something new. Since you will usually be collecting new data, it stands to reason that you’ll need to do something new.

As such, we hope that you will spend the time to attempt all the tutorial exercises and explore all the tutorial topics. Programming is an active skill, so you need practice, which you can do by following along with the tutorial.

When you feel that you’ve gotten a handle on the basics, feel free to take our benchmarking quiz.