Introduction

This set of 5 workshops is an introduction to Python programming, with a focus on skills that would be relevant to students and researchers who are working with data, particularly tabular data.

These materials borrow heavily from the “Programming with Python” materials by Software Carpentry, which is available under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

The 5 workshops have the following goals:

1. To understand the basics of Python syntax, variables, and data types.
2. To learn how to work with tabular data in Python, including reading, manipulating, and visualizing data.
3. To learn how to automate tasks in Python, including working with multiple files.
4. To learn to use logic and modularity to make Python code flexible and reusable.
5. To develop good habits for programming for research in Python, including handling errors, debugging, and writing reliable code.

These workshops can count towards the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities.

Participants need to sign up for each workshop individually. It is not necessary to sign up for the first workshop in order to do the second (and so on), but note that each workshop will build on the topics covered in previous workshops in this series.

Setup Instructions

In these workshops, we will write Python code in a text editor called Visual Studio Code (VS Code).

NOTE: Feel free to use you own preferred text editor or Jupyter Notebooks to write code in these workshops, but keep in mind that some aspects may be unpredictably different from the way things appear on my screen. For example, I will frequently use the Python Debugger in VS Code, and other text editors may have an entirely different mechanisms for debugging, and you may have to figure that out on your own. If you want to follow what I’m doing exactly, you should install VS Code and the extensions that I list below.

Please follow the following steps/links to complete the setup for this workshop series.

1. Install a Python Interpreter
2. Install Visual Studio Code
3. Install the Python extension for VS Code. If you want more info on installing extensions for VS Code, see this page on their “Extension Marketplace”
4. Install this Python Debugger extension for VS Code