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Course Description

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

Talk to us!

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.

Mail us about anything – anything! – and we will always reply 🙂

What are the requirements for taking this course?

• 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 are you going to get from this course?

• Over 54 lectures and 10.5 hours of content!
• 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

Who is this course for?

• 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 🙂