inst326

INST 326: Object-Oriented Programming

Preliminaries: Introduction to the Course and Installation

• Syllabus and course overview
• Coding style guide and template
• command line vs. interactive vs. IDE
• situating the Python language in the context of other programming languages

Part 1: Fundamentals

Module 1: Python Fundamentals

• variables
• operators
• expressions
• conditionals

Module 2: Functions and Iteration

• function definitions
• function calls
• arguments and parameters
• return statements (fruitful vs. void functions)

Module 3: Data Types

• Strings
• Lists
• Dictionaries
• Tuples
• Sets

Module 4: Serialization and File I/O

• File handles & opening files in various modes
• Pickle
• JSON
• CSV
• XML (brief overview only) and lxml

Part 2: Object-Oriented Programming in Python

Module 5: OOP Fundamentals

• Classes and objects
• dot notation
• Methods and attributes
• init

Module 6: Inheritance and OOP Patterns

• Superclasses and subclasses
• How to extend a built-in class with subclassing (for example to create a special-purpose list type)
• Classmethods (maybe worthwhile?)
• Generators
• Decorators
• Other OO patterns?

Module 7: Exceptions and Logging

• Types of errors (syntax, runtime, logic)
• Catching exceptions
• Raising exceptions
• Creating your own exception classes
• Logging
• Log levels

Part 3: Python for Data Analysis

Module 8: Databases and SQL

• brief overview of relational databases
  • the Structured Query Language (SQL)
  • database normalization
  • primary and foreign keys
• sqlite DBs
• using Python’s sqlite3 module

Module 9: Testing

• modules and packages
• import syntax
• try/except
• assert/AssertionError
• pytest
• unittests

Module 10: Data on the Web

• HTTP
• HTML and BeautifulSoup
• Web scraping
• APIs
• Python’s requests module
• (if time allows) building websites with Flask

Module 11: Python for Data Analysis

• Pandas and dataframes
• Matplotlib and data visualization
• Jupyter notebooks (?)
• More on APIs