Programming would be incredibly time consuming if you couldn't reuse code. You've seen the basic form of code reuse already---the function, which allows you to lock up a transformation from some data to some other data, give it a name, and then apply it repeatedly, and to arbitrary data.
Well …
read moreIn this first week of the course, we're going to cover some core concepts of computer programming. With this, we will build a foundation to do more interesting things in the coming weeks.
Computers basically just do one thing: they complete very simple operations at astonishing speed.
For example, suppose you wanted to calculate the thousandth number of the Fibonacci Sequence read more
In this lesson, we're going to learn about how to get a feel for data in Python, using basic tools to look at our data.
First, however, let's make sure we have the right version of a library we need called Seaborn. Run the code in the next block and make sure that you get the right version.
read moreIn this lesson, we're going to learn how to open files and work with data from the disk. We'll start with the mechanical process of opening text files, and then move on to learn a little bit more about different kinds of data you'll see.
Here's the basic method of opening and reading text files. Suppose I have a file called hello.txt in my working directory. (Your working directory is the directory you run Python from on your hard drive. For those of you using Azure Notebooks, this should be your library, but talk to me if you see a file there and can't read it from Python.)
read moreIn addition to reading files locally, you can also read them over the internet.
When you use a web browser like Chrome to go to a URL ("uniform resource locator," or web address) like https://sociologicalgobbledygook.com, what you're actually doing is sending a request using the HTTPS protocol (which …
read moreRecall how in the first Python lesson we looked at the while loop and saw how it allows us to repeat instructions to the computer as many times as you want.
The next step up from a loop is a function, which allows us to wrap up a series of commands into a single command on its own. Let's take a look at an example.
read moreIn this lesson, we'll think about more ways to direct Python to do things repeatedly, or conditionally.
Let's start with more loops. I showed you the while loop before, remember?
In Python, the data you work with (like the things assigned to variables) have types, which specify the kinds of data they are and the things you can do with them.
A good way to understand this is to think about the difference between letters and numbers. While we can write both down, there are different things we can do to them. It wouldn't make sense (except in an algebra context) to multiply and divide letters; it would't make sense to talk about a capital and a lowercase number 3.
read moreSome kinds of data can store other kinds of data.
We've actually seen the most common complex data type a few times before, I just haven't pointed it out to you. We make a list by enclosing the elements of a list in square brackets.
In this lesson I'm just going to describe the main libraries that we'll see when we work with data in Python.
Numpy is the first library we work with. By convention, it's imported with import numpy as np. Numpy really provides two things to our workflow:
Math that goes faster than unadorned Python could do it---which is important when you're doing statistics, because under the hood computational stats can take a lot of calculations.
read moreAn unavoidable fact of life for people who write code is error messages. You're happily programming along, and then, all of a sudden, you get a massive screen of terrifying text telling you that you screwed up!!
Object-oriented programming (OOP) isn't all that special, it's just a particular style of programming that Python is particularly well designed for. This is a short lesson, we won't cover the theory of OOP, or features you might hear about elsewhere like "inheritance"---see your reading in the P4E book for more.
read moreRegular expressions (or "regex"/"regexes") are one of the most powerful programming tools for lawyers. Essentially, regular expressions are a powerful specialized programming language built into other languages like Python, which allow you to express complicated text searching operations.
The utility of this for lawyers should be obvious: lawyers have to deal with lots and lots and lots of documents, and sometimes need to search through those documents for specific information. If those documents are in electronic form, regular expressions can provide you with a much more powerful way of searching than what is built into ordinary applications.
read moreThis is a lightly edited version of the notebook that we worked through in class on 1/22/19.
In class, we went through how to make an API call end-to-end, to get a look at common tasks like figuring out documentation, using libraries, making HTTP requests, etc. Over the weekend, practice with this API and others (you might also try the one at opensecrets.org read more