ESCI 451-Python

Test status:

You can run these notebooks on

Introduction to Python for VUW ESCI 451 course (Active Earth).

Designed to be a 4 half-day workshops, first run in March 2020.

These notebooks aim to get students with no previous computing experience to a point where they can automate simple data I/O and processing, as well as conduct some simple plotting. These notebooks do not aim to teach you the nuances of Python as a language, or any advanced ideas in Python.

The notebooks are as follows:
1A. Introduction to Python - why programming, reproducibility, keeping data and processing seperate;
1B. Python logic - for loops and if statements, basic data types, getting data;
2A. Loading and Plotting data;
2B. Introduction to NumPy;
3A. Pandas and higher-dimension data;
3B. Time-series;
4A. Basic map making;
4B. Working with gridded data.
5A. Introduction to scripting
5B. Extras - for the keen-beans

Getting started

To run these notebooks locally you will need to install the required Python packages. If you are taking this as a course at VUW this should have been done for you. Otherwise, you will need an anaconda or miniconda installation. To get miniconda follow the instructions here.

Then install the required packages listed in the environment.yml file using conda:

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate esci451

Finally, open jupyter-lab and select the notebook from the left that you want to open:

jupyter-lab