Beyond Basic Programming - Intermediate Python

About this course

So you have taken an initial programming course or have learned the basics on your own. However, when you look at other people's code, or listen to their discussions, you see many concepts that seem alien -- stuff that you don't understand. So, the question is: how do you go from a beginning level programmer to the expert level? How do you become a guru? This course answers this question. In it, we will be building on top of your existing basic understanding of the Python language (and programming in general). We will cover concepts that will take you to the next level of programming expertise. These will include language constructs that are typically not covered in a beginner level course. Concepts like generators, decorators, callbacks, higher order functions, context managers and others. We will also discuss some tools that are not difficult but are essential to the life of a professional programmer. An example of this is logging for tracking down bugs -- a simple technique that is used in all production level software but is never touched upon in typical programming courses.  We will discuss parallel programming -- multi-threading and synchronization issues -- another important concept you must understand to code in a production environment. We discuss these through a case study to explain WHY you need them as well as HOW to use them. Closely related to this, a highly important concept in today's programming practice is the idea of asynchronous programming -- more commonly known as asyncio. Python and Javascript -- two of the most influential languages in today's development -- are heavily focused on this new paradigm and we will cover this in a very intuitive, easy to understand manner. For all concepts, we take a case study-base

Course objectives

• to build on existing basic Python knowledge
• to introduce advanced programming concepts
• to provide practical case studies for understanding real-world applications