Baby Steps in Data Journalism
Five Life Jackets to Throw to the New Coder - Python tutorials
This PPT gives my rationale for starting journalism students on Python — instead of JavaScript.
Continuing the PPT series that reviews the lessons learned in Learn Python the Hard Way.
See the first week’s PPT > Exercises 1 - 12
See the second week’s PPT > Exercises 13 - 19
See the third week’s PPT > Exercises 20 - 26
This concludes the four-week series. In the book, there are still more exercises (up to 52).
Continuing the PPT series that reviews the lessons learned in Learn Python the Hard Way.
See the first week’s PPT > Exercises 1 - 12
See the second week’s PPT > Exercises 13 - 19
Learning Python - Week 2 from Mindy McAdams
Continuing the PPT series that reviews the lessons learned in Learn Python the Hard Way. See the first PPT > Exercises 1 - 12.
The “Visualize Execution” button below the code window lets you see a step-by-step graphical representation of what the code does. Wow!
This slideshow is a review of the first 12 exercises in Zed Shaw’s Learn Python the Hard Way, a free online book. Which is … awesome.
Learning Python - Week 1 from Mindy McAdams
You can download this PPT from the Slideshare site. There are comments and some links in the PPT.
Good code is readable code.
You have to register to take this course (learn Python!) — but it’s free, and it’s from MIT. The course starts Feb. 4, 2013, and requires about 12 hours of work per week — until the end of May 2013.
From MIT Open Courseware:
This course will provide a gentle, yet intense, introduction to programming using Python for highly motivated students with little or no prior experience in programming. The course will focus on planning and organizing programs, as well as the grammar of the Python programming language.
Lectures: 4 sessions/week for 3 weeks, 1 hour/session
Labs: 3 sessions/week for 3 weeks, 2 hours/session
Starting on Oct. 25, I was able easily to complete the first 35 exercises in Zed Shaw’s free online book, Learn Python the Hard Way. I did all the extra credit questions, looked up lots of stuff on other websites, wrote lots of code and tested it again and again.
I think my plan to have journalism students complete these exercises in four weeks as part of a class is fair and reasonable. Some of the students should be able to go further than Exercise 34 in that time.
To see all my posts here about Zed’s lessons, use the tag zed shaw.
Now, sadly, I must leave Zed’s book for a while and test-drive some other lessons. My theory is that spending four weeks learning from Zed will prepare students for JavaScript and jQuery. That’s where I’ll go next. Not really data journalism, so I don’t think I’ll be posting a lot about that work here in this Tumblr.
I hope I’ll be able to return to Zed’s lessons in a few weeks.
