Python for Everybody Specialization, University of Michigan

This is an online course provided by University of Michigan through Coursera.org, the online education website providing courses from the best universities around the world. This was an 8 weeks course covering the first ten chapters of the book, Python for Informatics, by Dr. Charles Severance at University of Michigan, School of Information, who is also the instructor of this course. The book is free to download (Book is licensed under a Creative Common Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License).

As per the author this Python textbook focuses on exploring data instead of understanding algorithms and abstractions. The goal is to teach people lifelong data handling skills using Python for librarians, managers, lawyers, biologists, economists, etc., who want to skillfully use technology in their chosen field.

The course was a wonderful for some beginner like me and is also suitable in a way that what was being taught could be directly applied to my real life work. The overall course consist of 5 levels which are as below:

• Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python)
• Python Data Structures
• Using Python to Access Web Data
• Using Databases with Python
• Capstone: Retrieving, Processing, and Visualizing Data with Python

Each of these takes around 4-7 weeks and there is a graduation ceremony after the first two levels. First two levels cover first 10 chapters of the Python for Informatics book, which consist of total 16 chapters. The remaining levels cover the remaining 6 chapters which are basically built up on the first 10 chapters. I completed the first two levels. The topics covered are as as below:

1. Why should you learn to write programs?
2. (Computer hardware, Understanding programming, Building blocks of program, Terminology: Interpreter & compiler)
3. Variables, expressions, and statements
4. (Values and types, operators and operands, Expressions, String & Modulus operator, Asking the user for input)
5. Conditional execution
6. (Boolean expressions, logical operators, conditional execution, alternative execution, chained & Nested conditional)
7. Functions
8. (Function calls, built in functions, math functions, flow of executions, parameters and arguments)
9. Iteration
10. (While statement, infinite loops, break and continue, for loops, loop patterns)
11. Strings
12. (Length of string, string traverse, string slices, looping & counting, string methods, parsing, format operator)
13. Files
14. (Opening & reading files, test files and lines, searching through file, using try, except and open, writing files)
15. Lists
16. (List operations, list slices, list methods, list arguments)
17. Dictionaries
18. (Dictionaries and files, looping and dictionaries, advanced text parsing)
19. Tuples
    1. (Tuple assignment, dictionaries and tuples, using tuples as keys in dictionary, Multiple assignment)