Introduction

Overview

Questions

• What is the goal of this workshop?

Objectives

• Give an overview of the topics that will be covered in the workshop.

What is the goal of this workshop?

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The motivation for this workshop comes from a feeling among participants in other workshops that there are many topics and tools that one needs to more or less “stumble upon” in the daily work of programming. These items are typically outside of the purview of a beginner or introduction course, but are also not necessarily advanced topics. These are questions that can crop up in the course of writing a script that sometimes lead individuals to unintentionally “reinvent the wheel”, as they are unaware that many of these tools and techniques are already available in the base Python libraries or are common programming patterns that can be easily implemented.

Our goal is to give a broad and shallow overview of several of these elements, bringing as many of them together at the end into a single project as possible.

Topics

We will cover several topics in this workshop, such as:

• What is a Virtual Environment? Why and how would I use one?
• What exactly is a python module? How can I write my own and use them in my own projects?
• What are some of the useful built-in modules that come with Python and how can I use them?
• What exactly are Classes and how can I use them to write more efficient and reusable code?
• What is unit testing and why would I want to bother with it?
• What are some tools to enforce code cleanliness?
• How can I build and deploy a finished project for someone else to use?

Key Points

• This workshop will cover a variety of intermediate Python topics that are commonly encountered in programming but may not be covered in beginner courses.