Category Archives: Coursera
Coursera: Week 5
Learn to Program: The Fundamentals Week 5 – while loops, lists, mutability This week I learned that, of course, I’ve been doing it all wrong. Guido van Rossum has decided that there’s no room for individuality, and Python script must be standardized. To quote from Intermezzo: Coding Style: “Name your classes and functions consistently; the convention is …
Coursera: Week 4 – Is It For You?
Learn to Program: The Fundamentals Week 4 – for loops, fancy string manipulation This is the week I discovered I’m an addict. It was Friday, I had a long to-do list, but made the mistake of checking my e-mail. Oh, the lectures and assignment for the following week are already up. Fast-forward 6 hours and I …
Coursera: Week 3 – Beginner Tips
Learn to Program: The Fundamentals This is from the syllabus: Week 1 – Installing Python, IDLE, mathematical expressions, variables, assignment statement, calling and defining functions, syntax and semantic errors Week 2 – Strings, input/output, Booleans, function reuse, function design recipe, docstrings Week 3 – import, namespaces, if statements As you can see, it’s fairly rigorous. One of the …
Learn to Program: The Fundamentals – docstrings
This week we were introduced to documentation strings. Find the rundown here: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0257/. According to the Coursera profs, the docstring of a function should contain a Description – including what it returns; the Type Contract – the types and values of the parameters, e.g. ‘int => float’ ; and examples to test the function – which …
Coursera: Week 2
Learn to Program: The Fundamentals Before the class started, I looked for on-line reviews. Although there were people who were not happy with the course, they were short on specifics. To get a better idea of what’s entailed, the first assignment, scripts and instructions are available here: http://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/programming1/a1/a1.html. Personally, I think this would be tough …
Coursera: Week 1
Learn to Program: The Fundamentals The first week was pretty much what you would expect. I envisioned using the first few weeks as a review course, but it turns out not so much. I’ll get to that in week 2. The course is using Python 3 – unfortunately, not compatible with Python 2 – so …
Python Programming 