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Welcome to the Coursebook program

Congratulations on taking your first step towards becoming a data professional!

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Pre-requisites

Estimated time: None to 30 minutes Before you get started, make sure you have the following installed on your machine with the right privileges. If your machine is issued by your company, you may have to ask your IT department to grant you the necessary permissions and firewall access.
  • Install Python 3.7 or higher
  • Install Git
  • Install a code editor (I recommend Visual Studio Code, or VSCode for short)
  • Install Tableau Public
The Python courses will be taught using Python 3.7 or higher. For the most part, if you’re using a version of Python that’s slightly older, you should be fine.

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Tooling and Setup

Estimated time: 45 minutes

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Python programming environment

To test that you have set up everything correctly, complete the following steps: Estimated time: 1 Hour
1

Pull external data into Python

  1. Use a command prompt or your Terminal to launch your command line interface, then pip install requests to install the Requests library.
  2. Type python or python3 to launch the Python interpreter.
  3. Run the following code snippet to pull external data into Python:
import requests
response = requests.get('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/supertypeai/idx_total_historical_1995/main/market_cap_history.csv')
print(response.text)
2

Use Pandas and Matplotlib

  • pandas is a powerful data manipulation library that allows you to work with structured data in Python.
  • matplotlib is a plotting library that enables you to create visualizations from your data. We’ll be using these libraries extensively throughout the Python data analysis courses.
Install these two libraries by running pip install pandas matplotlib in your terminal.Then, run the following code snippet to visualize the data you pulled in the previous step:
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

url = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/supertypeai/idx_total_historical_1995/main/market_cap_history.csv'
df = pd.read_csv(url)

df['market_cap'].plot()
plt.show()

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Practice your skills directly

Estimated time: 30 Mins You really only get better at programming by, well, programming. So, we’ve set up a series of exercises that you can work through to practice your skills.

GitHub Repositories

A gentle introduction to Python and R programming, for the absolute beginner.