Get Started with Python

You’ll discover the main features and benefits of the Python programming language, and how Python can help power your data analysis. Python is an object-oriented programming language based on objects that contain data and useful code. You’ll become familiar with the core concepts of object-oriented programming: object, class, method, and attribute. You’ll learn about Jupyter Notebooks, an interactive environment for coding and data work. You’ll investigate how to use variables and data types to store and organize your data; and, you'll begin practicing important coding skills.

Next, you’ll discover how to call functions to perform useful actions on your data. You’ll also learn how to write conditional statements to tell the computer how to make decisions based on your instructions. And you’ll practice writing clean code that can be easily understood and reused by other data professionals.

You’ll start off by exploring loops, which repeat a portion of code until a process is complete. You’ll learn how to work with different kinds of iterative or repeating code, such as for loops and while loops. Then, you'll explore strings, which are sequences of characters like letters or punctuation marks. You’ll learn how to manipulate strings by indexing, slicing, and formatting them.

Now, you’ll explore data structures in Python, which are methods of storing and organizing data in a computer. You’ll focus on data structures that are among the most useful for data professionals: lists, tuples, dictionaries, sets, and arrays. You’ll also discover how to categorize data using data loading, cleaning, and binning. Lastly, you’ll learn about two of the most widely used and important Python tools for advanced data analysis: NumPy and pandas.

You will put everything you have learned about Python so far into practice with an end-of-course project. You’ll complete an end-of-course project by using Python to inspect and organize a dataset provided in a realistic workplace scenario.