Welcome to this course on Python basics. The first steps of any learning journey are often the most difficult, so congrats! 😃 We are delighted to assist you in your learning.
Whether this is your first OpenClassrooms course or your 100th, let’s take a moment to set you up for success and preview the material available to you.
Meet Your Teachers
This course was created by Raye Schiller, and the video content is presented by Will Alexander.
Raye is a software engineer at TargetSmart, a political data company. They received a Masters in Engineering degree from Cornell University and studied Digital Media and Computer Science at CUNY Hunter College. Raye previously worked at JPMorgan Chase as a software engineer. Visit Raye's website.
Will is a full-stack developer, specializing in the Angular framework. As a freelancer, he works with a variety of companies on projects of different sizes and complexities, and has taught several courses on OpenClassrooms. He studied music at IMEP in Paris (formerly the American School of Modern Music), and works as a professional musician and music teacher alongside his programming work. He is currently studying towards a degree in Applied Mathematics and Statistics.
What's Covered?
The foundation of the course is divided into two parts:
Part 1: Create Data Using Python, where we'll work with the building blocks of code.
Part 2: Manage Program Logic in Python, where we'll get those building blocks to do something using program logic.
These two parts provide a base for all of your future Python projects. If you pass the two quizzes at the end of these parts, you'll be eligible for the Learn Python Basics course certificate. 🥳
You may have noticed an additional part in the course:
Part 3: Extract Data From the Web Using Python Libraries. This is optional but highly recommended. In this part, we'll walk you through the challenge of applying your new, foundational Python skills to a useful, real-world activity called web scraping. We'll use the requests, Beautiful Soup, and CSV libraries to automate the task of collecting useful data from the internet. The final quiz is also optional but will help you determine how prepared you are to take on a web scraping project more autonomously in the future.
If it's optional, why a third part?
Automating a task and leveraging third-party Python libraries are both highly useful skills to add to your Python tool belt, regardless of the direction your coding projects may take you in the future, whether as a software developer, data scientist, digital marketer, or other professional. In addition, web scraping, or more generally the extract-transform-load (ETL) process, is an activity that can be applied in any of these diverse career paths. So don't miss out! 😉
How Will I Learn All This?
The course is intended to be interactive and fun, with an emphasis on practical learning. In this course, you'll encounter:
Chapter videos, in which Will presents and elaborates on the key concepts of the chapter.
Screencast videos, in which Raye takes you step by step through some of the more challenging aspects of the Python coding process, especially as we get into Part 3.
Practical exercises, which will allow you to try your hand at coding with Python in a coding environment called a sandbox - kind of like a playground for code! These activities are found in the Level Up sections found throughout the chapters.
Follow me in the next chapter to install your Python environment!
