Beginning Python Programming Course For Complete Beginners

Introduction of Python programming

Hi to everyone, we hope you have a nice programming day, today the aim of our article is to teach some of Python using as references examples from diverse areas like mathematics, science, engineering, marketing and other topics that you wanna share with us! The computer technology and applications have a remarkable feature, they have increased their development and sophistication with a significative speed in the last two decades, impacting the learning and teaching of programming in all levels, especially the curriculum at the introductory level.

What is Python?

From this perspective the students are expected to learn topics about programming and it's use in classical problem solving, so this learning can give the experience to enter advanced topics like software development, complexity analysis, and data structures. Furthermore the high importance of the object-oriented programming as a dominant paradigm in the computation and problem solving has increased the interest from instructors and textbooks in the teaching of programming languages like C++, Java, Python and others as a first course in programming.

This has caused an increment of the amount of information provided in the introductory courses, this information can be explained in terms of syntax, methods and concepts related with the particular program. In this scenario Python it's a suitable programming language for learning Computer Science because it's flexible, accessible and comfortable for expressing ideas about computation, it can be taught little by little, so the students don't need to learn all the language features before making significative achievements.

Python creates a common reference for beginners and experts. So if the student learn the ideas related to Python in the first course then we can expect she/he can introduce more easily to other programming languages and go further in using her/his skills for problem solving in different fields related to computation.

In this article we will give the information needed for introduce yourself in the world of Python, at first we will talk about the advantages of using Python, after that we will show how to download Python in different operating systems such as Windows, Mac and LINUX, we will show the process of installation in Windows. Furthermore we will show how to use an editor IDE or Integrated Development Environment for writing programs and correct our possible mistakes.

Python is free and available in Internet, as well as the editor. We choose Python because this is a suitable language for learning and teaching the a introduction course to Computer Science, it is very accessible and can be incrementally taught, so students can start to write programs before having to learn the whole language.

We will show you too some interesting applications of Python in Statistics, Actuarial Science, Mathematics, Physics and any other field that would like to ask to us, so let's begin!

Why learn Python?

Why learn Python?, if you asked this to yourself from the beginning then you are not so far from all the people who began to study Python. The whole question would be, if we have many programming languages that can do different tasks efficiently then why should we learn Python? This question is natural and arise in any learning process. The main features of Python that make it suitable  can be the following:

• Python it's easy for beginners, if you are one of them then you will write programs in Python quickly and you will have all the features of recent program language like object oriented and data structure.
• Python has simple and safe semantics. You will find that any expression whose writing is incorrect will have an error message. 
• Python has simple and conventional syntax, Python use expression which are similar to algebra and statements are very close to pseudo codes.  This improves the learning of the students and help them to focus in problem solving.
• Python provide you a highly interactive experience, so you can input expression and statements to your interpreter and obtain immediate feedback, this freedom allow you to create your won code and experiment with new approaches for solving problems. Furthermore you can save code segments which can be run as modules and independent modules.
• Python can be used for general purposes, it implies that Python includes or is related with actual applications.
• Python is a free program well recognised in the industry. You can download it and run in a diverse set of devices.
• Python has a great number of users, from beginners to expert, this explain the great user community of Python in the world and the widespread of Python in the industry, science, engineering and others.

Installation

We will provide a step by step guide for downloading and installing Python, we will focus in the installation in Windows, if you want more information about installing in other operating systems we suggest you to go to the final part of this section.

At first we need to obtain Python, remember Python is free and available in Internet, the link for downloading Python can be found here. You can find the following menu.

Pay attention to the menu in blue, About, Downloads, Documentation, ..., click in Downloads and pick up the suitable installer for you. Mostly wanna install the latest version of Python and this is practical because the actualisation of Python are newer for the latest version in general.

Now you will see this window

I choose the 3.6.1 version as you can see, now please wait until it is downloaded. After you finish the download then you will see this menu

Click Run and continue with the process taking all the defaults to install it  choose Install Now, Wait until the bar achieves 100%.

At this stage you will have finished the installation congratulations, now you have Python 3.6 in your computer.

Although we won't need an IDE (IntegratedDevelopmentEnvironments) to run Python programs, the debugger will help you to understand how Python program works, how to identify mistakes, follow the routine of your programs step-by-step and run them quickly. We will use  Wing IDE 101, download it free in this link http://wingware.com/.

Check the download option in the menu. Here you only need to download the link related to the file

Download the Wing 101 in the version Windows installer 32 bit and 64 bit and show all the features by default from the installation

Now it's time to analyse a new usage of Command Prompt, it's possible to use command prompt for programming directly in Python without using IDE environment, here you can find a really simple example which allow you to define the dimension of a figure and describe it's total area in terms of this dimensions. As you can see the definition of the variables is done line by line and then we use that set of values for making simple math operations in order to get the final result.

Now it's time to learn some complementary books, courses, online tutorials and much more for helping you to study Python from the beginning.

Useful Books for Learning Python

We will explore the current options that you can find for learning Python using diverse books from recognised authors. Our choice will be guided by some well know references from important Editorials, we hope you can find some of these books on Internet and you can learn a lot from amazing teachers.

It's possible you are the type of learner who enjoys more learning from a book with history and examples, the following books can give this and much more:

• A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python. Hans Petter Langtangen-Springer Verlag
• The Python Workbook A Brief Introduction with Exercises and Solutions-Springer Verlag
• Python’s Companion The Most Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Python Programming
• Python Programming Fundamentals. Lee, Kent D.
• Introduction to Computing and Programming in Python (4th Edition)
• An Introduction to Python and Computer Programming. Yue Zhang

Check too Wiki Python, it's possible you can find something useful there.

Online courses for Learning Python

In order to improve your learning experience we provide you a lot of web pages for learning and use Python interacting and making your Python experience enjoyable. Our choice is for free learning because we believe the knowledge should be for everyone and the sharing has to be a precedent for improving and change our life and the life of the people around to us. Sharing knowledge is share a part of you, so now let's share more about programming of Python online!!

• Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python. A new and updated introduction to computer science as a tool to solve real-world analytical problems using Python 3.5. MIT, EDX.
• Learn to Program Using Python Hands on introduction to the Python programming language. University of Texas. EDX
• Introduction to Computing using Python Learn the basics of computing and python programming, including fundamentals of procedural programming, control structures, and data structures. Georgia Tech, EDX.
• Codecademy Learn Python
• Learnpython.org
• Introduction to Python: Fundamentals Build on what you learned in the “Introduction to Python: Absolute Beginner course, and dig into data structure basics.. Microsoft, EDX
• Introduction to Python: Absolute Beginner In this course that’s perfect for true beginners, learn Python basics and start coding right away. Microsoft, EDX
• Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python). University of Michigan, Coursera.
• Python Programming: A Concise Introduction.
• Data Camp. Intro to Python for Data Science Master the basics of data analysis in Python. Expand your skill set by learning scientific computing with numpy. Data Camp.

The online learning can increase your chances to overcome the difficulties of your environment and improve your learning with challenges and new information, please check more courses about Python and diverse topics in web pages like EDX. Free Online Courses. Advance Your Career. Improve Your Life. and Coursera, access to the best online courses of the world.

We hope this article can help you to introduce yourself in the world of Python!. Thanks for reading Prograp, have a nice day, if you have any question please contact us through this media, we will be contacting you in order to help you!!!