Self Paced Class

Focused on PhD researchers:
Learn at your own pace and schedule

Get going with Python instantly

Our foundational big data course – covers the most useful coding material for researchers – learn at your own pace.

Self-paced videos instruction: All concepts explained with videos
Interactive examples: Illustrating the code, while allowing you to adjust and adapt the examples to understand how the functions work
Exercises: Reinforce your understanding with exercises illustrating the material
Foundational class: No prior programming experience needed - classes will cover concepts from the ground up.
Research focus: All material specifically selected to be useful for researchers
Instructor background: Course delivered by Dr. Gareth Keeves (PhD in Strategy, University of Michigan)

Course Syllabus

Structure of the self-paced course

Section 1: Introduction to core concepts

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Numbers: Floats and Integers 2 Topics

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Integers and floats

Exercise: Working with numbers

Strings 6 Topics

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Introduction to strings

Exercise: Working with strings

Accessing specific characters in a string

Exercise: Accessing specific characters in a string

Dealing with apostrophes and quotation marks

Exercise: Apostrophes and quotation marks

Defining and redefining variables 3 Topics

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Defining variables

Restrictions on variable names

Exercise: Defining variables

Lists 7 Topics

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Introduction to lists

Accessing and changing list elements

Exercise: Accessing and changing specific content in lists

Further list operations

Exercise: Further list operations

Nested lists

Exercise: Nested lists

For Loops 3 Topics

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Introduction to for loops

Exercise: For loops

Looping over nested lists

If statements 6 Topics

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Introduction to if statements

Exercise: Using If Statements

Conditional logic

Conditional logic with multiple conditions

Extending the If statement: Elif

Exercise: Multiple different conditions with Elif

Week 1 Wrap Up 1 Topic

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Week 1: Fuzzy concepts

Section 2: Functions and further foundations

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Sets 4 Topics

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Introduction to sets (and how they are different from lists)

Introducing sets continued

Determining if an item is in a set

Exercise: Using sets

Dictionaries 4 Topics

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Introduction to dictionaries

Updating dictionary elements

Exercise: Using dictionaries

Further details on dictionaries

Counters 2 Topics

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Introduction to counters

Exercise: Counters

Tuples 1 Topic

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What are tuples

Summary of data types 1 Topic

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Re-cap of the data types covered to date

Functions 7 Topics

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Introducing functions

Exercise: Creating simple functions

Passing multiple arguments and returning multiple variables

Passing arguments by position and keyword

Exercise: Passing by position and keyword

Default values in functions

Functions need defining before they can be used

Section 3: Working with data

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Introduction: Setting up your local coding environment

Setting up Python 4 Topics

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Downloading Python

Installing Python

Ensuring Python is installed correctly and opening Python from the command line

Using Python in interactive mode

Setting up Visual Studio Code 3 Topics

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Introducing Visual Studio Code

Installing Visual Studio Code

Setting the color scheme in Visual Studio Code

Setting up your environment: Wrap up

Loading in data 3 Topics

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Loading in data from TXT files

Loading in data from CSV files

Loading in data from JSON files

Formatting of loaded data: General 2 Topics

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Converting data types

Replacing characters

Formating of data: Dates 5 Topics

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Introduction to working with dates

Further examples of converting strings to dates

Accessing properties of a date variable

Calculating the difference between two dates

For awareness: Guessing the date format to input inconsistent dates

Keeping your code organized

Error types 4 Topics

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Common error types

Syntax Errors

Run-time Errors

Tips for dealing with errors

Working with files and directories 4 Topics

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Looping over files in a folder

Determining if a file or directory exists

Creating a new folder

Accessing file properties

Outputting Data 3 Topics

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Saving data to TXT files

Saving data to CSV files

Saving data to JSON files (for completeness)

Week 3: Wrap up

Section 4: Working with text

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Week 4: Live class catchup

Built in string operations 5 Topics

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Re-cap of string operations covered to so far

Other useful string operations: Part 1 – startswith/endswith

Further String Operations Part 2: Searching for substrings

Further String Operations Part 3: Accessing sub-strings by index

Accessing multiple list elements by index

List comprehension 2 Topics

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Overview of list comprehension

Removing specific terms from company names via list comprehension

Python Packages 5 Topics

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What are Python packages?

Installing Python packages

Package dependencies

Updating and uninstalling Python packages

A caution on Pip

Cleaning special characters

Fuzzy Matching 2 Topics

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What is fuzzy matching

Illustrating fuzzy matching

Stemming words 2 Topics

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Introduction to stemming

Illustrating stemming

NLTK: Introducing natural language processing 5 Topics

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Introduction to NLTK – the Natural Language Toolkit

Splitting up text with NLTK

NLTK Split up sentences to words

Classifying terms with NLTK

Beyond NLTK

Regex 5 Topics

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Introduction to Regex

Very basics – matching characters

Delving in further with regex: Wildcards

Using multiple wildcards

Increasing the flexibility of wildcards

Using regex in Python 7 Topics

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Using regex in Python – Introduction

Replace – re.sub

A note on raw strings

Section 5: Integrating databases with Python

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Week 5: Live class catchup

Python Skills 1: Importing modules in Python 5 Topics

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Overview of importing modules

Importing your own code: Part 1

Importing your own code: Part 2

Importing modules – comparison of both approaches

Adding to the system path

Python Skills 2: Capturing Errors 4 Topics

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Capturing Errors

Capturing Errors: Try/Except

Exercise: Capturing Errors

The use of pass

Python Skills 3: Deleting files 3 Topics

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Deleting files in Python

Dealing with files that don’t exist

A caution on deleting files

Python Skills 4: sleep

What is SQL and why use it 3 Topics

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Introduction to SQL

SQLite vs other versions of SQL

Browsing SQL: DB Browser

Overview of SQL commands 2 Topics

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Illustrating SQL commands

Illustrating SQL commands in Python

Introducing SQL in Python via Peewee 4 Topics

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Introducing Peewee

Creating a database in Peewee

Different field types in peewee

Storing information in the database

Loading in data via peewee 2 Topics

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Loading in information from a database

Loading in select information

Further operations working with databases 4 Topics

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Using transactions to insert data

Making a column an index to a database

Allowing empty values

Unique values in a database

Week 5: Wrap up

Section 6: Pandas, NumPy and data analysis

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Week 6: Live class catchup

Python skills 2 Topics

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import as

Pretty print

Introducing NumPy 4 Topics

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What is NumPy

NumPy basics: Arrays

Working with NumPy arrays: Arithmetic

NumPy: Matrix multiplication, and other matrix operations

Introducing Pandas 3 Topics

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Introduction to Pandas

Introducing dataframes in Pandas

Loading data into Pandas dataframes

Dataframes basics 5 Topics

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Accessing specific rows in a dataframe

Selecting specific columns

Accessing a ‘cell’ of the dataframe

Iterating over rows

Accessing row labels and column names

Working with dataframes in pandas: Part 2 6 Topics

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Introduction to working with dataframes

Sorting dataframes

Descriptive statistics

Changing elements of a dataframe

Merging dataframes: Part 1

Saving dataframes to CSV files

Matplotlib 9 Topics

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Introduction to Matplotlib

A simple line plot

Changing the presentation on the plot

Plotting multiple lines using pandas dataframes

Different plot types

Bar plots

Histograms and density plots

Scatter plots

Other plotting packages

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Week 7: Live class catchup

Expanding for loops and introducing while loops 3 Topics

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What is continue in a for loop

What is break in a for loop

What is a while loop

Enumerating over lists 2 Topics

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What is enumerating over lists?

Enumerating over CSV files

Using range

Random numbers 2 Topics

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Introducing random

Further options with random numbers

Introducing defaultdicts 3 Topics

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Introducing defaultdicts

Examples of types of defaultdicts

Deufaultdict summary

Functions: Differences between mutable and imtable variables 8 Topics

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Passing variables to and from functions (recap)

Temporary variables in a function

Recap of mutable vs immutable objects

The difference between mutable and imputable objects with functions

Accessing variables defined outside a function

Functions can’t (by default) change global immutable variables

You can change mutable variables defined outside functions

How to use global variables with functions

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Self Paced Class

Focused on PhD researchers:
Learn at your own pace and schedule

Get going with Python instantly

Course Syllabus

Course Content

Course Content

Course Content

Course Content

Course Content

Course Content

Course Content

Prefer a virtual live class component?

Register for information on future classes

Self Paced Class

Focused on PhD researchers: Learn at your own pace and schedule

Get going with Python instantly

Course Syllabus

Course Content

Course Content

Course Content

Course Content

Course Content

Course Content

Course Content

Prefer a virtual live class component?

Register for information on future classes

Focused on PhD researchers:
Learn at your own pace and schedule