A hands-on, from-scratch introduction to Python for data analysis — no prior programming experience assumed. Roughly equivalent to an introductory DataCamp track, but self-contained and free to use.
It takes you from your very first line of code to working with real data tables in pandas, with slides and a hands-on notebook for every topic.
Anyone who wants to learn Python for data work — researchers, students, and the merely curious. You don't need any programming background. If you can use a spreadsheet, you can start here.
It also serves as the recommended prerequisite for applied courses that assume basic Python (such as computational text analysis).
| # | Module | What you'll learn |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Setting Up Python | Ways to run Python, editors & IDEs, virtual environments, cloning repos |
| 1 | Getting Started | Variables, data types, arithmetic, strings, f-strings |
| 2 | Data Structures | Lists, dictionaries, tuples, sets |
| 3 | Control Flow | if/elif/else, for loops |
| 4 | Functions | Defining functions, arguments, scope, list comprehensions |
| 5 | Strings & Files | String methods, splitting/joining, reading & writing files |
| 6 | NumPy | Arrays and fast numerical computing |
| 7 | pandas | DataFrames: loading, filtering, grouping, plotting |
Work through them in order — each builds on the last.
Everything is grouped by module. Inside each, slides/ holds the lecture deck (PDF to view,
.tex source to edit) and notebooks/ holds the hands-on material — an _exercises notebook to
work through and a matching _solutions notebook.
1_getting_started/
slides/ lecture deck (.pdf + .tex)
notebooks/ *_exercises.ipynb and *_solutions.ipynb
2_data_structures/ ...
Module 0 is a little different: setting up Python happens on your own computer, so it's mostly slides + a reference notebook of commands rather than interactive exercises.
The notebooks are built for Google Colab — nothing to install. Click the "Open in Colab" badge at the top of any notebook, or open Colab and load it from GitHub.
To run locally instead, see requirements.txt (Python 3.10+ recommended). Module 0 walks through
setting that up.
Shared under CC BY 4.0 — free to use and adapt with attribution. See LICENSE.