Description
A Note on the Python versions 2 and 3: The code-alongs in this class all use Python 2.7. Source code (with copious amounts of comments) is attached as a resource with all the code-alongs. The source code has been provided for both Python 2 and Python 3 wherever possible.
What's Covered:
Introductory Python: Functional language constructs; Python syntax; Lists, dictionaries, functions and function objects; Lambda functions; iterators, exceptions and file-handling
Database operations: Just as much database knowledge as you need to do data manipulation in Python
Auto-generating spreadsheets: Kill the drudgery of reporting tasks with xlsxwriter; automated reports that combine database operations with spreadsheet auto-generation
Text processing and NLP: Python’s powerful tools for text processing - nltk and others.
Website scraping using Beautiful Soup: Scrapers for the New York Times and Washington Post
Machine Learning : Use sk-learn to apply machine learning techniques like KMeans clustering
Hundreds of lines of code with hundreds of lines of comments
Drill #1: Download a zip file from the National Stock Exchange of India; unzip and process to find the 3 most actively traded securities for the day
Drill #2: Store stock-exchange time-series data for 3 years in a database. On-demand, generate a report with a time-series for a given stock ticker
Drill #3: Scrape a news article URL and auto-summarize into 3 sentences
Drill #4: Scrape newspapers and a blog and apply several machine learning techniques - classification and clustering to these
Using discussion forums
Please use the discussion forums on this course to engage with other students and to help each other out. Unfortunately, much as we would like to, it is not possible for us at Loonycorn to respond to individual questions from students:-(
We're super small and self-funded with only 2 people developing technical video content. Our mission is to make high-quality courses available at super low prices.
The only way to keep our prices this low is to *NOT offer additional technical support over email or in-person*. The truth is, direct support is hugely expensive and just does not scale.
We understand that this is not ideal and that a lot of students might benefit from this additional support. Hiring resources for additional support would make our offering much more expensive, thus defeating our original purpose.
It is a hard trade-off.
Thank you for your patience and understanding!
Who is the target audience?
Yep! Folks with zero programming experience looking to learn a new skill
Machine Learning and Language Processing folks looking to apply concepts in a full-fledged programming language
Yep! Computer Science students or software engineers with no experience in Java, but experience in Python, C++ or even C#. You might need to skip over some bits, but in general the class will still have new learning to offer you :-)
Basic knowledge
No prior programming experience is needed :-)
The course will use a Python IDE (integrated development environment) called iPython from Anaconda. We will go through a step-by-step procedure on downloading and installing this IDE.
What will you learn
Pick up programming even if you have NO programming experience at all
Write Python programs of moderate complexity
Perform complicated text processing - splitting articles into sentences and words and doing things with them
Work with files, including creating Excel spreadsheets and working with zip files
Apply simple machine learning and natural language processing concepts such as classification, clustering and summarization
Understand Object-Oriented Programming in a Python context