Course Details

A Note on the Python versions 2 and 3: The code-alongs in this class all use Python 2.7. Source code (with copious amounts of comments) is attached as a resource with all the code-alongs. The source code has been provided for both Python 2 and Python 3 wherever possible.

What's Covered:

• Introductory Python: Functional language constructs; Python syntax; Lists, dictionaries, functions and function objects; Lambda functions; iterators, exceptions and file-handling
• Database operations: Just as much database knowledge as you need to do data manipulation in Python
• Auto-generating spreadsheets: Kill the drudgery of reporting tasks with xlsxwriter; automated reports that combine database operations with spreadsheet auto-generation
• Text processing and NLP: Python’s powerful tools for text processing - nltk and others.
• Website scraping using Beautiful Soup: Scrapers for the New York Times and Washington Post
• Machine Learning: Use sk-learn to apply machine learning techniques like KMeans clustering
• Hundreds of lines of code with hundreds of lines of comments
• Drill #1: Download a zip file from the National Stock Exchange of India; unzip and process to find the 3 most actively traded securities for the day
• Drill #2: Store stock-exchange time-series data for 3 years in a database. On-demand, generate a report with a time-series for a given stock ticker
• Drill #3: Scrape a news article URL and auto-summarize into 3 sentences
• Drill #4: Scrape newspapers and a blog and apply several machine learning techniques - classification and clustering to these

Using discussion forums

Please use the discussion forums on this course to engage with other students and to help each other out. Unfortunately, much as we would like to, it is not possible for us at Loonycorn to respond to individual questions from students:-(

We're super small and self-funded with only 2 people developing technical video content. Our mission is to make high-quality courses available at super low prices.

The only way to keep our prices this low is to *NOT offer additional technical support over email or in-person*. The truth is, direct support is hugely expensive and just does not scale.

We understand that this is not ideal and that a lot of students might benefit from this additional support. Hiring resources for additional support would make our offering much more expensive, thus defeating our original purpose.

It is a hard trade-off.

Thank you for your patience and understanding!

Who is the target audience?

• Yep! Folks with zero programming experience looking to learn a new skill
• Machine Learning and Language Processing folks looking to apply concepts in a full-fledged programming language
• Yep! Computer Science students or software engineers with no experience in Java, but experience in Python, C++ or even C#. You might need to skip over some bits, but in general, the class will still have new learning to offer you

BASIC KNOWLEDGE

• No prior programming experience is needed :-)
• The course will use a Python IDE (integrated development environment) called iPython from Anaconda. We will go through a step-by-step procedure for downloading and installing this IDE.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• Pick up programming even if you have NO programming experience at all
• Write Python programs of moderate complexity
• Perform complicated text processing - splitting articles into sentences and words and doing things with them
• Work with files, including creating Excel spreadsheets and working with zip files
• Apply simple machine learning and natural language processing concepts such as classification, clustering and summarization
• Understand Object-Oriented Programming in a Python context