Welcome to Data Science Tools and Programming. This module is designed to give you a general overview of the course. In addition it will go over topics that you are expected to know coming into the course and give guidance on setting up your computer and the cloud based tools which will be needed in this course.
There are two sets of tasks this week. The first is to get your environment set up to be able to be successful in the later stages of this class. This may not be a small undertaking if you run into configuration issues, so make sure to start early. It should be as easy as installing a few programs, but when things go wrong it can be very hard to figure out way.
The other task is to demonstrate and review your basic Python programming. You may need to look up a few things to remember syntax, but in general nothing in the programming activities should be new or confusing to you. It is simply review. If you do find any portion of it difficult, that is a good indication that you are going to have to do a fair amount of review otherwise you will find the later portions of the class really difficult.
conda
on the command line. This is the place to learn how to do it. Somewhat unintuitively, you should go to Tasks not Tutorials to learn how to do the basic stuff with conda. Tutorials is for writing software that conda can use. The Tasks section is about how to actually use the tool itself which is what we are concerned about.This week is always a bit unpredictable. If you came in, confident in your Python and software installation and use all went off without any technical issues, you could be in the situation of not having a whole lot to do. But, as is often the case, there might be some parts of Python you need to review or you might run into incredibly unhelpful error messages when trying to configure Anaconda or the Google Cloud SDK. These can sometimes take many hours of web searching and trial and error to debug.
Whichever camp you fall into, this week should have at least exposed you to using quite a few new third party tools. That is not going to change for the rest of the class. You might end up reusing a lot of these same tools, but expect to always be learning about new tools and libraries to collect, change, visualize or analyze large sets of data.