Who Should Take This Course?

Target Audience

This course is for programmers who can already write basic Python and want to learn the parts of the language that larger programs depend on. It covers error handling, classes, generators, and working with files, threads, and the network.

The course suits three groups of learners:

• Programmers who have finished a first Python course. You can write loops and functions. Now you want to read and write the kind of Python that real projects contain.
• Developers who know another language. You already use classes, exceptions, and threads in Java, C#, or JavaScript. You want to learn how Python handles the same ideas.
• Computer science students. You use Python in your coursework and want a structured tour of the language beyond the basics.

The course does not teach data science libraries like NumPy or pandas, and it does not teach a web framework. Almost every lesson uses only Python and its standard library, which is the set of modules that comes with every Python installation.

Prerequisites

This course starts where Grokking Python Fundamentals ends. If you have not taken that course, or if you are unsure about any topic below, we recommend that you complete it first.

Before you start, you should be comfortable with these topics:

• Variables and data types: numbers, strings, Booleans, and converting one type into another.
• Control flow: if, elif, and else statements, for and while loops, break, and continue.
• Built-in collections: lists, tuples, dictionaries, sets, and list comprehensions.
• Functions: default values, keyword arguments, *args, variable scope, and simple recursion.
• Modules: importing a module with import, or a single name with from ... import.

You do not need any experience with exceptions or classes. The first chapter teaches error handling from the beginning, and the Object-Oriented Programming chapter does the same for classes.