Tutorials

Samples from the "Python for Absolute Beginners" Course


First Python Programming Tutorial

Welcome to the exciting world of Python programming! If you are interested in learning how to write code, you have come to the right place. Python is a very powerful, yet easy-to-learn programming language. Follow this course, and we guarantee that you will be able to write simple, yet useful applications within weeks.

We have designed this material for absolute beginners. Our goal with the course is to help you grasp the basics...

Using the IDLE Code Editor

Welcome back! This time we are going to use Python’s built-in code editor to write a simple application that greets us and tells us how many days we’ve lived so far. It won’t read our minds, so we’ll have to provide our name and age, but the code will do the rest of the job for us.

Click Windows’ Start button, or launch the macOS Finder application. Type “idle” (without using the quotation marks) to launch IDLE, the code editor that...

Samples from the "Python Data Structures" Course


Demystifying Python Tuples

Hi there! This is the first tutorial in the "Python

data structures" course. Our goal with this module is to help you become familiar with advanced data structures that can be used in your scientific programming projects.

Let’s start our tutorial by discussing tuples, which are

very similar to the Python lists we’ve discussed in the “Absolute Beginners" course.

Here’s a quick ‘list’ tutorial recap...

Working with Dictionaries

Welcome, developers! Today, we are going to learn about dictionaries. Just like real-life dictionaries, Python dictionaries use pairs of elements named keys and values. When we want to understand the meaning of a word in a regular dictionary, we use the word (that would be the ‘key’ in Python) to look up its explanation (the ‘value’ in Python).

Imagine a piece of paper where you write down your friends’ favorite foods. It might look something like this...

Samples from the "Python Internet Scraping" Course


An Introduction to Web Scraping

Hey there, fellow coders! Python is a fantastic programming language, and it shines when it comes to accessing web resources. It’s amazing what you can do with only a few lines of code, so let’s get started! We are going to scrape Wikipedia’s homepage in this tutorial, displaying all the outbound links.

Don’t forget that we shouldn’t hammer third-party websites by writing code that brings their servers down. Just visit the page(s) you want, grab the info, and then leave...

Beautiful Soup 101

Hello and welcome! It’s time to put that Beautiful Soup library we’ve been talking about to the test. This time, we are going to start working on a more complex application that will extract pricing information from a page on Data Alliance’s website.

We’re going to fetch the price of the “Alfa AWUS036H 2000mW Long-Range WiFi USB Adapter”, create a graph that shows price

variations over time, and even have the application alert us via email when the price changes...

Samples from the "Data Analysis and Visualization" Course


Using SQLite and DB Browser

Hi everyone! Welcome to the first tutorial in the "Data

Analysis and Visualization" course. So far, we have learned to store data in text files and retrieve it later. Now, it’s time to move on to the next level and implement what the real pros use in their scientific applications: databases.

Databases are ideal for scientific programming;

they can shuffle around millions of records without putting a strain on regular computers...

Database Coding in Python

Hello again! This time, we will resume our data analysis and visualization training by creating databases through code. While working with DB Browser for SQLite can be fun, it’s not the practical way to do things when we are handling tens of thousands of data records – or more.

And since practicability is one of the core values of UniSci 24, here’s one of the most concise and yet fully functional examples of Python code for creating a database and adding data records...