Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 August 2021
Start to learn how to program in the popular Python programming language. This video will show you how to install Python, start a simple programming editor, create basic programs, use variables and test conditions: everything you need to write your first Python programs!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 10 August 2021
Learn how to install Visual Studio Code as your editor for Python programs, how to use it to run programs and how to set it up so that you're as productive as possible.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 September 2021
This video explains how to create loops which execute while a particular condition is true (and how to break out of these loops), how to print messages more neatly and how to use ranges to loop over sequences of numbers.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 11 October 2021
Virtual environments allow you to keep your different Python systems independent of each other. You don't have to use them, but you'll almost certainly regret it if you don't!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 12 October 2021
The key to writing Python programs is to make effective use of modules (both those built in to Python, and external ones). This tutorial shows you how to import, install, list and use modules.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 12 October 2021
Learn how to step through code using the Visual Studio Code debugger, how to view (and change!) the value of variables, how to set conditional and other breakpoints and how to interrogate the call stack.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 13 October 2021
Iterating sequences has a good claim to be the most important topic in Python. This tutorial shows the four types of sequences (tuples, lists, ranges and strings), explains how to loop over them and gives 4 practical examples of their use.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 14 October 2021
The previous tutorial in this series looked at looping over all of the elements of a sequence, but there are a number of tricks that you can use to pick out just a subset of the elements in a list, tuple, range of numbers or string, using a technique called slicing, as explained in this tutorial.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 14 October 2021
Having looked at iterating over sequences and slicing them, this final tutorial on sequences shows other things you can do with them, including joining and splitting them, enumerating them, sorting them, reversing them, copying them and adding and removing items.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 15 October 2021
Processing a list usually involves applying a condition to exclude unwanted items and then transforming the result to get what you want. A list comprehension provides an elegant, concise way to combine these two things.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 16 October 2021
Python makes reading and writing files and looping over files and folders a joys, as this tutorial (which includes a long worked example towards the end) hopefully will demonstrate!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 18 October 2021
Sets in Python provide a beautifully elegant way to remove duplicates from a list and to compare the contents of two lists, as this tutorial hopefully will prove to you!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 19 October 2021
A Python dictionary contains create a set of key/value pairs to make it easier to look up details about any item - all is explained in this video tutorial!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 25 October 2021
Instead of writing your code in a single long file you can (and should) call separate functions to handle discrete tasks. In addition to all the modules supplied by third parties, this tutorial shows you how to create your own libraries of useful functions.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 26 October 2021
For all but the simplest programs, you'll probably need to master some of the techniques described in this tutorial, such as passing arguments by keyword or position, using optional arguments and creating lambda functions.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 01 November 2021
Learn how to use the try-except-else-finally code block to trap errors, how to raise errors from functions and how to avoid the need for error-trapping in the first place!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 02 November 2021
A summary of the most useful operators and functions (many of which have been used in previous tutorials in this series) that you can use when programming in Python.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 02 November 2021
A summary of ways in which you can work with the Boolean data type (representing True or False) in Python.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 02 November 2021
How to use the datetime and calendar modules in Python to get and set dates and times, and to format them so that they look tidy.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 November 2021
This tutorial shows all the useful things that you can do with strings in Python, including joining and splitting them, using escape characters, finding and replacing text, changing case, justifying text and using regular expressions and translation tables.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 04 November 2021
This tutorial covers all aspects of extracting data from websites using Python: from the ethics and legality of web scraping, via the structure of a web page's document object model through to using the Python requests and BeautifulSoup modules to extract meaning from HTML.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 November 2021
Learn how to use connections and cursors to get rows of data from SQL Server databases from within Python, how to commit insert, update or delete statements and how to execute stored procedures, passing parameters.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 November 2021
Learn now to use the built-in CSV module to read in and write out CSV files easily, either as plain text or as dictionary items.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 06 November 2021
Learn how you can serialise data in a JSON file (and what this means!), then how to write data to JSON files and read it in from them. The tutorial finishes with an example based on your Visual Studio Code debug settings file.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 08 November 2021
After a discussion of the various ways of working with Excel from within Python, learn how to create Excel workbooks and worksheets, reference cells and loop over worksheets and cells using the openpyxl module.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 09 November 2021
If you're a VBA programmer, you'll love the fact that you can get at the MS Office COM object models from within Python using the win32com.client module. This practical tutorial shows how to manipulate Excel and Word from within Python, how to translate VBA programs and how to list Outlook emails and download attachments in Python.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 10 November 2021
The NumPy module in Python lets you create and manipulate single-axis or multi-dimensional arrays. This tutorial will (among other things) show you how to create, multiply, sort, filter, join, slice, transpose, flatten and clip arrays using NumPy!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 12 November 2021
This tutorial explains what pandas is and does, including creating dataframes, importing data into them from CSV files, Excel workbooks and SQL Server tables, indexing dataframes, showing statistics and much more besides!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 12 November 2021
This short tutorial shows you how to configure Power BI to find Python modules, how to load data from a pandas dataframe and how to base a Power BI visual on a matplotlib chart.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 26 January 2022
Like most other modern programming languages, Python encourages you to code using classes (it's called object-orientated programming). This tutorial will teach you using a practical example about objects, attributes or properties, methods, instantiation and much more besides!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 27 January 2022
Learning the theory of classes is one thing; putting them into practice quite another. This tutorial shows how you can use classes to write a game of hangman, explaining the design decisions taken along the way.
