“Forget Wall Street lingo. The language Citigroup Inc. wants its incoming investment bank analysts to know is Python” — Bloomberg
Python is one of the most popular coding languages of the past decade. It is designed to be easy to read while still being very powerful, which makes it an ideal language for beginners. It’s not just for beginners, though. Python is used by thousands of world-famous companies including Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Instagram, and Reddit. It is most often used for building websites, web scraping, data analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing.
Learning Python has even gone mainstream with dozens of jobs requiring Python skills such as financial advisors, data journalists, and digital marketers.
Yes! Our course assumes no previous knowledge of programming or code. We do, however, assume that you’re fairly comfortable using a computer (Mac or PC) and can navigate the internet using a web browser (we recommended Chrome!).
Python is a general-purpose programming language that has wide application in various fields. In this lesson, we look at some areas in which Python is used, for example in web development, desktop app development, data science, building Internet of Things, creating distributed systems, etc. What can you do with Python? There are many, many cool things! We take a look, as well as cover what you will learn in this course.
You might be wondering: How and why should I start learning Python? To help you answer that, we’ll look at various programming languages and compare a few popular ones with Python.
We look at the history of Python and explore the differences between Python 2 and Python 3. For the course, we use (and recommend) Python 3. Python 2 is legacy, Python 3 is the future and so we recommend learning the latter. The two versions share similarities, so if you learn Python 3, you will still be able to read and understand any legacy Python 2 code you might come upon.
Mattan Griffel is the co-founder of One Month, and is faculty at Columbia Business School. He was selected as one of Forbes' 30 Under 30 in Education in 2015. Mattan teaches and advises on growth hacking, online education, and learning to code. He has advised companies like Pepsico, Bloomberg, and JPMorgan, and has been featured in Forbes, BusinessWeek, and The New York Times.