swcarpentry/bc — pull request #209 by ethanwhite (2013-12-18 16:56:00+00:00)
Title: Intermediate Python Introduction

This is a draft of a first Intermediate Python lecture that I've been working on for feedback. The goal of this lecture is to provide a quick introduction/refresher to the basics of Python for folks who haven't used it or have forgotten the details. Following @gvwilson's lead I've jumped straight into using a data library. I'm using Pandas since it's the standard for tabular data at this point, but I'm open to the idea that Numpy is a better choice for our purposes. My current thinking is that this will be followed by the following lectures:

1. A growing data analysis example laid out by the first paragraph of this current lecture. This will introduce modularization (including functions), documentation, writing for humans, etc. (this might well end up in two pieces).
2. Error handling (building on this example)
3. Testing (building on this example)