A blog post for Washington State University’s Python Working Group Blog

This post is the first in a two-part series of introductory python talks for the start of the semester. The majority of this talk is based on Software Capentry’s Python Notice Inflammation lesson.

—

Watch the recording of the presentation here. Presentation by Sarah Murphy (sarah.y.murphy@wsu.edu). Data used in this lesson can be downloaded here. We will use the inflammation-01.csv file in the Data folder for this lesson. 

Some vocabulary

• Library - Families of code. You can import these to give you extra tools
• Variable - A value with a name assigned to it.
• Function - A named group of code. Can be imported by itself or with a library.
• Arguments/Parameters - Variables or values given to a function.

Getting Python on your computer

• Download Python on it's own (https://www.python.org/downloads/
• I use Anaconda: https://www.anaconda.com/. This comes with Jupyter Notebook and Spyder. It also comes with a library manager (conda).

---

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""
Created on Fri Sep 10 11:58:43 2021

@author: smurphy
"""

weight_kg = 60

# Defining variables
## Includes letters, digits, and underscores
## Case sensitive
## 0weight, 1weight doesnt work, can't start with a number


# floating point number
floatingnumber = 60.2
floatingnumber_2 = 60.0

# integer
integernumber = 60

# strings
stringnumber = '20'

weight_lb = 2.2 * weight_kg

print('The weight in kg is ', weight_kg)

print(type(weight_kg))

print(type(stringnumber))


import numpy

text_file = numpy.loadtxt(fname = '/Users/smurphy/swc-python/data/inflammation-01.csv',
              delimiter = ',')

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.plot(text_file[:,0])

References

• Dataset and rough outline of code comes from the Software Carpentry lesson (https://swcarpentry.github.io/python-novice-inflammation/)
  • Lesson primarily from the Python Fundamentals lesson, vocabulary from the Reference section.