Python: Getting Started

Course Overview
Hi everyone! My name is Bo Milanovich, and welcome to my course, Python: Getting Started. I have been a Python developer for a long time, and I'm super excited to share my knowledge of this awesome programming language. With Python, you can build web apps, desktop apps, do scientific computations, create scripts, artificial intelligence software, and even home automation software. This course is a getting started course for developing python applications, and you don't need prior experience with Python at all. Some of the major topics we will cover include installing Python on every major operating system, learning the syntax and the basic features of the language, developing a console application and converting it into a web app, and creating executable files and setup wizards from our Python app. By the end of this course, you'll know the basics of Python programming and be ready to develop applications on your own. From here, continue learning by diving into Python frameworks and libraries with courses on Django for web development, TensorFlow for artificial intelligence, SciPy for scientific computation, and PyQt for cross-platform desktop applications. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn Python with the Python: Getting Started course at Pluralsight.

Introduction
Hi! Welcome to the Getting Started with Python course. My name is Bo Milanovich, and I will be your instructor for the course. In this course, we will first learn the basics of Python, things like data types such as integers or strings, functions, classes, and of course some unique Python-only features. You will see how to put it all together. Throughout the course, we'll be working on a console application that we will later convert to a web application while reusing most of our code. Now how cool is that? Python is a very simple, beautiful, yet extremely powerful programming language. You can get started almost immediately with minimal setup required. It is cross-platform, which means that it can run on most major operating systems including, of course, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. And you don't have to modify your code at all. But what can I use Python for? you wonder. Well you can use Python for pretty much anything. Use it for building console applications, scripts, scientific computations, web back-ends, desktop applications, and even home automation and machine learning or artificial intelligence apps. The list just goes on. This is a beginner-friendly course so I don't expect you to have any previous knowledge of Python. But I would appreciate it if you had atleast some basic general programming knowledge, meaning you know what a function does and what a variable is. Even if you do know Python, I highly recommend that you continue with the course. Python consistently ranks as one of the most popular programming languages in the developer community. In the end, you will really see how simple Python is yet how amazing it is at the same time. But what is it exactly that makes it so amazing?

Types, Statements, and Other Goodies
Welcome back! Hope you're enjoying the course so far. In this module, we're going to get our hands dirty and see some Python code. We will take a look at Python's built-in data types such as integers, strings, Boolean, flow control statements like if, for and while loops and lists, which are very similar to arrays, and you will then learn Python dictionaries, which is a fairly powerful data type, and it closely resembles JSON. Throw in some try and except into the mix so we can see if our code will execute and, if needed, handle something called exceptions. Of course, Python has a lot of other built-in data types such as tuples, sets, frozen sets, complex. My hope is that by the end of this module, you will be familiar enough with the basic Python data types that you will be able to learn the rest of them by yourself. In the end, you will see that you don't really have to worry about data types in Python as much as you do in some other languages. Namely, you don't have to declare a type of the variable in advance. Python will figure that out for you. There are some advantages and some disadvantages to this approach. So let's take a look.

Functions, Files, Yield, and Lambda
Hello and welcome back! My name is Bo, and in this module, we will expand the knowledge of our individual code pieces and start working on building blocks. We will learn more about functions and their parameters, opening, reading, and writing to files, and even lambda expressions, which is a fancy name for what in reality is a function. But more excitedly, we will finally start working on our app. So what is our app going to be about?

Object Oriented Programming - Classes and Why Do We Need Them?
Hi again! Welcome back to the Getting Started with Python course. My name is Bo Milanovich, and in this module we are going to learn one of the main components of Python--classes. We will unravel the power of classes, take a look at inheritance, their special methods. And we'll try to answer one very important question, Do we really need classes in Python? We will also take a look at Python modules or, rather, how we can split or wrap into multiple files for easier organization of our program. Throughout this module, we will continue working on our PyStudentManager app and, again, continue to employ the newest techniques of programming we learned. In the end, we will have a refactored PyStudentManager app that is going to be using classes rather than just functions. Alright, let's start.

Putting It All Together - Let’s Make It a Web App
One more time, welcome to the Getting Started with Python course. My name is Bo Milanovich, and in this module, we're going to convert our console app into a web app using a fairly popular Python web microframework called Flask with the goal of reusing most of our existing code. We will also learn about installing third-party packages using Python's pip and talk a little bit more about something called PyPI.

Python Tips and Tricks
Hello again. In this unique module, we're going to take a look at some interesting features of Python, as well as some tools that we can use to help us distribute our application. We will see how we can work with virtual environments, and they are amazing by the way, how we can debug our application using PyCharm, how we can create binary or executable files from our Python app, and by this I mean the. exe file for Windows for example, and even how we can create a setup wizard so that it is easier for the user to install our app. So let's begin.