Python Basics

Introduction to Python Programming

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In this section, we introduce the Python programming language, focusing on understanding basic syntax, packages (libraries) of use in ecological engineering analyses, including reading/writing data, manipulating data, data visualization and numerical analysis and optimization. We only touch on the basics, as there are numerous Python tutorials on the web (see the links at the bottom of this page), and instead focus on tasks frequently encountered in engineering analyses. We also provide a number of example notebooks showing code usage in practice.

Python Topics

Topic	Concepts	Examples
Anatomy of a Python Program	Basic ideas of Programming in Python
Getting Started with Some Simple Programming Tasks	Built-in data types Simple calculations Defining Functions Formatted Output numpy, matplotlib packages	1. More Examples
Introduction to Python Data Types, numpy arrays, built-in functions, and "Slicing"	Built-in data types/functions Sequences numpy arrays Slicing	2. More Examples
Pandas Cookbook for Data Management	Reading/Writing Datasets Extracting Data Filtering and Sorting Datasets

Additional Python Resources on the web:

Microsoft Python Tutorial - a set of very good. free tutorials produced by Microsoft that provide a good introduction to Python Programming.
- The "Official" Python Tutorial - The tutorial hosted by Python.org, the folks who maintain Python.