Python Fundamentals and Applications

This unit develops foundational Python skills for building, testing, and deploying small applications. Students will work with core data types and structures, control flow, functions and classes, plus environment management, data persistence, and basic web and deployment workflows to prepare for more advanced software development tasks.

Learning Objectives

• Apply Python data types and structures to create and manipulate strings, lists, tuples, and dictionaries, including slicing, indexing, and nested access to model real-world data
• Demonstrate control flow and modular design by writing, testing, and debugging functions, nested decision statements, loop constructs (including nested loops), and exception handling to produce robust programs
• Implement modular applications and development setups by creating and importing packages and classes, configuring virtual environments (virtualenv), locating and installing third-party packages, and preparing applications for distribution (e.g., PyInstaller)
• Analyze and persist application data by creating and accessing files, interacting with relational databases using SQLAlchemy, and performing basic web programming and API integration (e.g., Google Maps) to combine local and external data sources