mhaythornthwaite / python-zero-to-mastery-course

Course, complete with personal notes & scripts completed in Q1 2020.

Zero To Mastery Python Course

                                                                          

I completed this course in Q1 2020, with the aim to refresh my python skills in preparation for learning and applying ML/AI libraries such as scikit-learn, tensorflow/keras etc. See below a brief summary I've put together of what was covered.

Course Contents

Section 3 Python Basics

• Learning different class types and methods on those classes to structure our data appropriately as well as some basic functions.

Section 4 Python Basics 2

• if statements and for loops as well as some new functions such as enumerate
• Parameters (name) and arguments (matt).
• Defining functions.
• Scope - what does the function have access to.

Section 5 Developer Environment

• Terminal, code editors, IDE's and notebooks explained.

Section 6 Object Oriented Programming

• Generating our own classes and methods on those classes.
• 4 pillars of OOP: encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance, and polymorphism.
• Introspection and dunder methods.
• Super inheritance and method resolution order.

Section 7 Functional Programming

• map, filter, zip and reduce (all higher order functions).
• Lambda expressions.
• Comprehension, list, set and dict.

Section 8 Decorators

• Higher order functions.
• Passing in parameters and decorator syntax.
• Performance decorator & authenticate decorator.

Section 9 Error (Exception) Handling

• while true, try, except, else (break), finally - syntax.
• raise & exception statement.

Section 10 Generators

• for i in range(n) .. yield.
• Allows the user to pass through a range one at a time without having a list in memory.

Section 11 Modules in Python

• Installing packages from pypi with pip.
• Importing build in modules and installed modules as well as individual functions, including sys.

Section 12 Debugging in Python

• pdb python debugger.

Section 13 File I/O

• File input/output.
• with statement and r(+), w(+) or a(+) modes. Main difference is where the stream is positions and ability to truncate.

Section 14 Regular Expressions

• These are used to test the contents of a string, useful for things like password or email validation.

Section 15 Testing in Python

• Looked at unittest and how to use it to spot areas for improvement in your code.

Section 16 Career of a Python Developer

• Brief section on what career options are available.

Section 17 Scripting with Python

• Image_processing -> using PIL and Pillow to filter, resize and convert images from JPG to PNG.
• PDF_Processing -> using PyPDF2 to combine, rotate and merge PDF's. Learned how to open a PDF by using instantiating it as a PdfFileReader or PdfFileWriter class.

Section 18 Scraping Data with Python

• Using the beautiful soup api to scrape web data.