this will probably turn out to be several sessions, not just one ...
interrupt me, if I am going too fast and tell me to slow down!
please speak up if you have a question or if you don't understand some concept I am talking about
this may not sound very technical at the beginning, because I want to get you set up with your own Python and we need to lean a few basics of the user interface you will use to talk to Python
this is meant to be interactive, I encourage you to follow along, try stuff yourself or ask for concrete experiments or for explanations of behavior you observe
that said: there will be notes ... e.g. what you see on screen now; in the form of of the Jupyter notebooks and Markdown documentation ... even code examples
I may gloss over certain details at the beginning for brevity
Peleg previously did a "Python for C++ developers" ... this is not a repeat, although certain elements will of course also appear here
We will focus on Python 3.10 and newer
If questions come up about older versions, including 2.x I'll try to address them, but it's been a while since I moved from 2.x to 3.x
Some of the code examples may not work on older Python versions, e.g. match/case
While I am fairly fluent, please don't expect me to know everything by heart; as is often the case my knowledge is based on those parts I used in practice
Developers knowing any other programming language will have a head start, but our speed will be adjusted to non-developers as needed!
This means that we will introduce some very basic concepts at the beginning to get going, then reuse the acquired knowledge and apply it in other areas
What can I use this for?
automation of daily tasks (compare to formulas in Excel/spreadsheet cells or macros)
sifting through text, mutating or otherwise processing text
if you participated in my regular expression introduction (or will participate in a future repetition) this can be applied almost 1:1
generally data analysis (not a focus here, but I'll provide some pointers)