Workshop Series: Intermediate Python

UC Davis DataLab
Author & Maintainer: Nick Ulle <naulle@ucdavis.edu>

• Reader

These five standalone workshops aim to help Python users understand language features, packages, and programming strategies that will enable them to write more efficient code, be more productive when writing code, and debug code more effectively. This is not an introduction to Python and is appropriate for motivated intermediate to advanced users who want a better understanding of working with Python for their research. Researchers from all domains at UC Davis who meet the workshop prerequisites are welcome to enroll.

Learning Objectives

See the reader for learning objectives.

Prerequisites

Participants are expected to have taken DataLab’s Python Basics workshop series and/or have prior experience using Python, be comfortable with basic Python syntax, and have it pre-installed and running on their laptops.

Contributing

The course reader is a live webpage, hosted through GitHub, where you can enter curriculum content and post it to a public-facing site for learners.

To make alterations to the reader:

1. Run git pull, or if it's your first time contributing, see the Setup section of this document.

2. Edit an existing chapter file or create a new one. Chapter files are Markdown files (.md) in the chapters/ directory. Enter your text, code, and other information directly into the file. Make sure your file:

   • Follows the naming scheme ##_topic-of-chapter.md (the only exception is index.md, which contains the reader's front page).
   • Begins with a first-level header (like # This). This will be the title of your chapter. Subsequent section headers should be second-level headers (like ## This) or below.

   Put any supporting resources in data/ or img/. For large files, see the Large Files section of this document. You do not need to add resources generated by your code (such as plots). The next step saves these in docs/ automatically.

3. Run the command jupyter-book build . in a shell at the top level of the repo to regenerate the HTML files in the _build/.

4. When you're finished, git add:

   • Any files you edited directly
   • Any supporting media you added to img/
   • The .gitattributes file (if you added a large file)

   Then git commit and git push. This updates the main branch of the repo, which contains source materials for the web page (but not the web page itself).

5. Run the command ghp-import -n -p -f _build/html in a shell at the top level of the repo to update the gh-pages branch of the repo. This uses the ghp-import Python package, which you will need to install first (pip install ghp-import). The live web page will update automatically after 1-10 minutes.

Setup

Python Packages

We recommend using conda to manage Python dependencies. The env.yaml file in this repo contains a list of packages necessary to build the reader. You can create a new conda environment with all of the packages listed in that file with this shell command:

conda env create --file env.yaml