Introduction & Prerequisites

[00:00:00]
>> Nina Zakharenko: A little about me, your instructor, my name is Nina Zakharenko. You might also know me as NNJA on twitter. I've written software for some pretty cool companies over the course of my decade long career in engineering. I've worked at Meetup. I've worked at HBO writing software for satellite computers.

[00:00:19]
I've worked at Reddit. These days, I work at Microsoft as a cloud developer advocate focusing on Python. I've been a professional Python developer for the past five or six years now, and it's absolutely my favorite language. If you'd like to stay in touch with me after the course, there are some links here on the course website.

[00:00:45]
>> Nina Zakharenko: This is an intermediate Python course. You might also see it referred to as Day 2 throughout the course website. During this course, we're gonna start getting more comfortable with some of the more advanced aspects of Python, like classes, list comprehensions in the standard library. At at the end of the day, you're gonna know enough to build a small interactive website using the Flask web framework.

[00:01:11]
Know that to fully participate in today's class, you must have VSCode set up locally, along with a Python version greater than 3.7. You must be familiar with all of the concepts from introduction to Python, which you might see referred to as Day 1. Clicking through to the Intro to Python section, you should be familiar with Python conventions like PEP 8.

[00:01:39]
Basic data types and variables, numbers, strings, the common errors and common mistakes you might make as a Python developer. Functions, defining them, arguments, function scope. The more advanced types of Python, the list, the tuple, the set and the dictionary, you must be familiar with mutability and know that a tuple is an immutable data structure, while list, set and dictionary is mutable.

[00:02:11]
You should know about boolean logic, the truthfulness of a value in Python, as well as how to make comparisons, such as greater than, less than. And and, or, and not, those boolean operators. You should know how to loop along with control statements. You should know the if statement, else, for loops, while loops and break, continue and return.

[00:02:41]
Lastly, you should know how to work with Python programs. How to run them, what the main method is, exceptions and tracebacks, and how to work with simple libraries. Lastly, you should know a little bit about what an API is and how to work with them. Requests and responses, HTTP status codes, and how to use the request library in Python.

[00:03:07]
If you're not sure if you know these topics, I would suggest that you go ahead and watch the Intro to Python course first. You're gonna get a lot more value out of intermediate Python if you have a solid understanding of these foundational concepts. If you're choosing to join us for Intermediate Python without doing the Intro Python course first, go ahead and scroll up to the top of the course website, click on the Course Introduction and then go to the Requirements settings.

[00:03:37]
You'll have to go through all of these steps to be able to follow along with the exercises in Intermediate Python.