Python Basics for Absolute Beginners

Day 1 (September 6)

This lesson introduces Jupyter notebooks and Python for absolute beginners. If you are completely new to text analysis, this is the place to start. This lesson describes operators, expressions, data types, variables, and basic functions.

Notebook Previews

• Getting Started with Jupyter Notebooks
• Python Basics 1

Day 2 (September 8)

This lesson describes the basics of flow control statements including:

• Boolean values
• Boolean operators
• Comparison operators
• if statements
• else statements
• elif statements
• while and for loop statements
• Handling errors with try and except

Notebook Preview

• Python Basics 2

Day 3 (September 13)

This lesson describes the basics of lists and dictionaries including:

• The in and not in operators
• Lists
• List methods (index(), append(), insert(), sort())
• Dictionaries
• Dictionary methods (update(), keys(), values(), items(), get())

Notebook Preview

• Python Basics 3

Note: The Python Basics Series contains two additional notebook templates. See them and many more Constellate lesson templates in our GitHub repository.

Day 4 (September 15)

We will show how to teach your own form of Python Basics at your institution using GitHub.