Chapter 1 Introduction
Why Python? Python is a common introductory language in computer science departments due to its relative ease of learning, versatility for many applications, and overall popularity. It is great general purpose language and complements more specialized languages like R. In this course we won’t do a deep dive into Python (for that follow a full fledged Python tutorial like the one described in Ch 9. Next Steps) but rather we’ll cover:
- Practical skills for writing a Python script and running it at the UNIX command line
- Taste of how Python works and how it can be used to parse through text files line by line
- Understand that UNIX commands can, and often are, Python scripts