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Welcome to the LearningPython wiki!
We'll be using Learning Python, 4th edition (important!) by Mark Lutz. It's about $35 and 1,100 pages. If you've ordered the book but need to get started faster, you can check out the Kindle version (Kindle app available for most computer operating systems), which has an extensive sample.
We're also using Python 2.7, which is similar to the version 2.6 discussed in the book. Version 3.x from the book doesn't have libraries that many of us need.
Besides simply working through the book, we'll be working on special projects, including cleaning data and Web scraping. We'll keep in touch through the mailing list, which is tagged with [PythonJournos]. You can also check the mailing list archives for more information.
There are a number of ways to install 3rd-party libraries for Python. Generally, the easiest method is to use a package manager that can also handle the downloading/installation of dependencies (additional libraries that a particular module might depend on). Below are the two standard package managers for Python:
- easy_install - the classic package manager that is part of the setuptools library
- pip, the emerging standard for Python package management
- Chapters 1-3: On your own
- Chapter 4 - Dave Gulliver (reading due Jan. 10)
- Chapter 5 - Chris Schnaars (reading due Jan. 17)
- Chapter 6 - Ron Campbell (reading due Jan. 24)
- Chapter 7 - Juan-Pablo Velez (reading due Jan. 31)
- Chapter 8 - Michelle Minkoff (reading due Feb. 7)
- Chapter 9 - Derek Willis (reading due Feb. 14)
- Chapter 10 - Anthony DeBarros (reading due Feb. 21)
- Chapter 11 - Brian Bowling (reading due March 7 (bumped a week due to NICAR conference))
- Chapter 12 - Jamie Smith Hopkins (reading due March 14)
- Chapter 13 - TBA (reading due March 21)
- Chapter 14 - TBA (reading due March 28)
- Chapter 15 - TBA (reading due April 4)
- Install/Config (Serdar)
- Python's Interactive Interpreter: A Sandbox for Exploring Data and Code (Serdar)
- Working with CSVs (Serdar)
- Working with Excel (Serdar)
- Working with Databases (Serdar)
- Data Wrangling 101: Scrape, Clean, Output (Serdar) -- Demonstrate how to scrape data from a multi-level website, perform some basic data cleaning and processing, and then output data as CSV and/or insert into a database. Aron Pilhofer has volunteered a test site with data for scraping
- ScraperWiki contains tuts, sample code, and even lets you ask others to write a scraper for you (though why would we ever do that, right?)
- An Introduction to Compassionate Screen Scraping, by Will Larson. This is a very good intro to scraping sites in a responsible way.
- Python Recipe: Grab page, scrape table, download file, by Ben Welsh