mullenkamp / ecanpythoncourse2019

ECan Python Courses 2019

The volume of data collected and available to scientists has grown in magnitudes over the past decades. It has grown to an extent that cannot be effectively handled by spreadsheets passed from one person to another. Fortunately, the toolsets to handle large amounts of data have grown as well, although it can be quite hard to keep up with the rapid developments of these toolsets.

The Python programming language is one of the most popular languages for both general purposes and scientific. This is due in part by the ease of use, open source code, and the large open source community that has developed a number of professional level toolsets for a wide range of applications.

The general goal of these courses is to teach Python tools that will benefit people who handle, process, and analyse lots of data. This will be accomplished through a combination of practical exercises and presentations.

All materials are accessible via the course website.

Intended audience

The intended audience for the courses are people with very little to some experience with programming (Python or otherwise). Those people with a lot of Python programming experience will not likely get much out of the courses unless they have not used the Pandas package in the past.

Course summary

The courses will cover the python basics and the fundamental handling of tabular data and the associated processing and analysis tools. We will be primarily using the toolset contained within the Pandas package. This will include reading/writing data, indexing, reshaping, computations, joining tables, time series handling, and visualization.

Prerequisites

The only prerequisite for the courses is to familiarise yourself with Jupyter notebooks as this will be the primary way we will be interacting with Python. Please go through "Using the Jupyter Notebooks for the course modules" in the section prerequisites. This section also contains a description on how to install Python on your own PC if interested.

Registration

Please sign up on the ME internal ECan site. There will be a maximum of 20 attendees for the workshop. Suggestions for advanced topics or examples are welcome.

Instructors

• Mike Kittridge
  • Senior Scientist - Hydrologist
  • Environment Canterbury
  • [email protected]
• Wilco Terink
  • Senior Scientist - Hydrologist
  • Environment Canterbury
  • [email protected]