Introduction

Over the next two weeks, we will be learning the basics of Python, like any other language, Python has its own complexities. We won't be able to cover all imaginable topics in this course, but we will cover the basics. The goal of this course is to give you a solid foundation in Python, so that you can continue to learn on your own.

• Setup
• Starting Out
• Control Flow
• Data Structures
• Functions And Classes

This course is going to be a bit more experimental than other courses offered by the IMPRS. Instead of being a full intensity course (half-) day course, we're going to meet for 90 minutes twice a week for two weeks. This will give you more time to work on the exercises and to ask questions.

Instead of simply being a lecture, this course is going to be exercise driven. This means that every session will start with the solution of the previous session's exercises. After that, we will introduce new concepts and give you new exercises to work on. We will then start to solve these exercises together in the session, and the remaining exercises will be for you to solve on your own (which we will then review in the next session).

We will touch the terminal a bit for this course, but we will not go into too much detail. If you want to learn more about the terminal, it is recommended for you to take the Bash course offered by the IMPRS.

To help you through the terminal parts of this course a cheat sheet is provided in the appendix via the Bash Cheat Sheet and Git Cheat Sheet. The Git cheat sheet is only applicable if you are using the Git repository for the exercises (recommended for people with Git experienced, or who have attended the Git 101 or Git 102 course).

After every session, you are able to give feedback on the course, this feedback can be anonymous or not, it is up to you. The feedback form can be found [here]. (It is not mandatory to give feedback, but it is appreciated, it allows us to improve the course.)

Code Snippets

In this book we will have a lot of code snippets, these snippets will be formatted like this:

print("Hello World!")

The expected output from a print statement will be formatted like this:

# > Hello World!