| Organised by BITS, the Bioinformatics Training and Service facility of the VIB. |
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Goal
- Learning the basics of Python programming: different variables, reading files, writing files, conditional statements
- Being able to write a basic Python script from scratch
- Using Python in Linux.
Summary
This course is organised over two full days. With the help of plenty hands-on exercises, you will get introduced into the different types of variables in python, the peculiarities of python and good programming habits. This course will provide you an ideal stepping stone for further developing programming skills in Python.
Required skills
Aimed for people with no programming skills whatsoever.
Training schedule
Day 1
- Short introduction to programming and Python
- Print statement - showing what your program does.
- Variables and operators - how to do math
- Conditions - deciding what to do
- Loops - doing the same thing with different information
- Lists and tuples - how to handle a range of variables
- File reading and writing - getting hold of data and dumping your results
Day 2
- Functions - re-using the same bit of code
- Imports - what functions does Python provide?
- Dictionaries - organising your variables
- Assert - stop before things go wrong
- Classes - get the most out of Python
Throughout the course we'll stress the importance of 'good programming practice', such as clear variable names and adding comments to your code.