A book for python-learners to learn the language by practicing it.

Purpose

The purpose of this book is to provide the prospective learners a self-taught material with executable notebooks. This book can be considered as practical code exercises when the (python) infrastructure is available. However, the pdf version of it can also be used as ebook. The book is more closely related to python section of tutorialspoint.com website. However, this book covers many topics which are not discussed there. More importantly, the code examples here can be downloaded as either jupyter notebook or .py files. Therefore, the user can access the complete material which is more helpful for practical purposes.

Who should read this book

This book is intended for absolute beginners, those who have no knowledge of python. A very little knowledge of programming can be helpful for the readers. The advanced python users may find advanced topics within each chapter in this book useful.

Installation

If you have internet connection, you have two options

Download the ipython notebook of a lesson and upload it on any cloud servers such as colab, binder or studiolab.
click on launch binder button and start running the code, cell by cell.

For offline users; first install python, the libraries mentioned in requirements.txt file and jupyter. Then the user can run any jupyter notebook which again can be downloaded all at once from website.

How to read this book?

This book consists of jupyter notebooks. Each jupyter notebook consists of multiple cells. Each cell consists of code snippets. The best way to get maximum out of this book is to follow following two tips

Predict the output from a cell before running the cell, then run the cell and see whether your prediction matches with the output of the cell or not!
Change the contents of the cell and predict the output and then run the cell and compare your prediction with actual output.
Answer the questions in the lessons.

Conventions

Since this is an executable book, which means all the code in this book is executed during the creation of the book. There is some code in the book which throws errors and has been commented out. The code which raises errors is for demonstrative purpose only and does not mean that it is a bug in the book. The readers are explicitly advised to uncomment those lines and run the code to see the error. For example, following code illustrates the working of TypeError. However, the code which actually raises the TypeError is commented out. When the user uncomment the line and runs it, he/she can see the error.

a = 2

# uncomment following line
# a + 'a'  # -> TypeError, we can not add integer and string types

Note

This is a living book which is currently being maintained actively on its GitHub repository. You can expect improvement in the book with time.

Chapters

Chapter 1. Basics

1.1 Variables

1.2 operators

1.3 sequential data

1.4 lists

1.5 copying lists

1.6 dictionary

1.7 sets

1.8 conditional statements

1.9 while loops

1.10 for loops

1.11 print

1.12 functions

1.13 args and kwargs

1.14 global vs local

1.15 nested functions

1.16 iterator vs iterable

1.17 read/write operations

1.18 Exceptions

1.19 generators

1.20 installing packages

1.21 builtin functions

Chapter 2. Builtiin modules

2.1 os

2.2 sys

2.3 time and dateandtime

2.4 copy

2.5 collections

2.6 types and typing

2.7 math

2.8 pathlib

2.9 warnings

2.10 random

2.11 csv

2.12 itertools

Chapter 3. Object Oriented Programming

3.1 Introduction

3.2 creating class

3.3 Attributes

3.4 methods

3.5 init method

3.6 str and repr methods

3.7 public vs private attributes

3.8 class vs instance attributes

3.9 static methods

3.10 class methods

3.11 property

3.12 descriptors

3.13 Inheritance

3.14 call

3.15 getattr

3.16 magic methods

3.17 getattr vs setattr

Chapter 4. numpy

4.1 understanding dimension/axis

4.2 stacking vs concatenating

4.3 quantile and digitize

Chapter 5. Pandas

5.1 Introduction

5.2 indexing and slicing

5.3 working with time series

5.4 reading/writing

5.5 apply

5.6 groupby

5.7 multi-indexing

5.8 efficient pandas

Chapter 6. Plotting

6.1 Introduction

6.2 basic plot

6.3 scatter plot

6.4 bar plot

6.5 heatmap

6.6 regression plot

6.7 lollipop plot

6.8 dumbell plot

6.9 circular bar plot

6.10 histogram

6.11 ridge plot

6.12 contour plot

6.13 pie chart

6.14 spider plot

6.15 parallel coordinates

6.16 taylor plot

6.17 boxplot

6.17 violin plot

6.18 Adding Marginal Plots

Chapter 7. Advanced Topics

7.1 Parallel Processing

7.2 cython

7.3 interfacing with C

7.4 interfacing with C++

7.5 interfacing with FORTRAN

7.6 interfacing with matlab

7.7 testing

7.8 Regular Expressions