Introduction to Python

1. First Acquaintance

In this section, you'll dive into the basics of Python, familiarize yourself with your workspace, tackle simple math operations, and display your results.

The Very First Steps

Comments

Some Simple Math

More Challenging Math

Challenge

Bringing It All Together

2. Variables and Types

Here, you'll learn how to store items like numbers and text in computer memory, recalling them by name. You'll also get a taste of text manipulation in Python.

Negative Indexing and Length

String Slicing

Challenge

Concatenation

3. Conditional Statements

Here, you'll delve into the boolean data type and discover its role in creating programs that respond to specific conditions.

Boolean Data Type

Challenge: Comparison Operators

Combining Conditions

Challenge: Logical Operators

Membership Operators and Types Comparison

Simple if/else Expressions

Challenge: Grocery Store

Challenge: Odd and Even

if/elif/else Expressions

Challenge: Grocery Store Extended

Challenge: Positive, Negative or Zero

4. Other Data Types

Continuing with data types, this section will teach you how to group varied attributes within a single variable using lists, tuples, and the dictionaries.

What Is a Dictionary?

Challenge

Dictionary Methods

Challenge

5. Loops

In this part, you'll master the art of writing loops in Python – essential constructs for iterating over lists, tuples, dictionaries, and even future dataframes.

Iterating Over Indexes

Nested Loops

6. Functions

To wrap up our introductory course, you'll explore some built-in functions and then embark on creating your very own!

Built-in Functions

Challenge

Defining Your First Function

Challenge

if/else Statements in Functions

Challenge

Functions With No Return

Nested Lists

As mentioned in the opening chapter, lists in Python can store various data types, even including other lists. What's unique about Python, compared to many other programming languages, is that these nested lists can differ in length.

Let's dive into an example. Imagine we have data about countries and their respective areas. Instead of jamming all that information into a single list, it would be more organized to have a distinct list for each country.

As illustrated, every country has its dedicated list nested within the primary list. Now, you might wonder, how do we navigate through such a structure? If we're dealing with a two-dimensional list, its elements are also lists. And, we can access the inner list's items using indexing.

Consider a two-dimensional list named countries_2d that contains 3 main elements (which are lists). Each of these lists has 2 items.

So, countries_2d[1] fetches the second list in the main list (keep in mind, Python indexing begins at 0). Moreover, countries_2d[1][0] retrieves the first item within that second list.

Check out the example below for clarity.