Python for Beginner Data Scientists

In Python, variables store values. Stored values can be displayed by the print() function. They can only consist of letters, numbers, and underscores, and are case-sensitive.

The print function (aka the print statement) displays the value that is stored to a variable to the output section of a code cell. In notebooks, it is not the only way to print out a value, but it is a foolproof method for doing so.

An overview of Machine Learning Modeling ands relationship to many fundamental Python coding concepts. An overview of different categories of algorithms including supervised learning's classification and regression algorithms.

Strings are how we represent text in Python. They are a sequence of characters that are wrapped in quotation marks. They're important for recording categorical data and can be manipulated in a variety of ways.

Comments are how we can leave notes in our code for the benefit of ourselves and others. Lines of code that are "commented out" won't be executed by Python, but are still readable by humans viewing the code.

Functions are one of the most important parts of any programming language. They allow us to store code to variables and make our code reusable. We pass information to functions via parameters and arguments and then functions return outputs to us.

f-strings allow us to insert raw values or values held within variables into text strings. This helps us create well formatted and readable output to display below our code cells for the benefit of anyone looking through our notebook.

Booleans, Conditionals and If Statements all come together to allow us to conditionally execute certain lines code in our programs if the right conditions are met. This gives our programs some basic decision making abilities and gives a logical flow to our program's execution which (as the writer of the code) we're able to control.

Lists are so important to Data Scientists! This is our first "data structure" which will allow us to store multiple pieces of data within a single variable. This is where we actually get to start working with and analyzing data!

Practice creating new lists and using some of Python's built-in functions to manipulate lists of numbers. We'll write a function that can calculate the mean of any list of numbers!

In this lesson we'll draw from our knowledge of one kind of sequence (strings) to learn about another kind of sequence (lists), to show that many operations on these sequences have a similar (if not identical) coding syntax.

More lessons are coming to this course soon. Written versions of each lesson and associated exercises will be released first followed and then video versions will be released sometime later. DM me (Ryan) on Discord if you're dying for the next installment.