? Learn Python with Google | Video Log - Week 1

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Last Monday I enrolled on Coursera to start learning Python with the Google IT automation with python professional certification.

The certification is made of six courses about IT automation using Python, that is one of the must learn languages of the IT industry in 2020.

Today it is Sunday, and it's the end of my first week learning Python.

By the way, my name is Fabio, and I am a Full Stack freelance developer.

Wow! I must say that I am impressed. The Python syntax is much easier if compared to other programming languages and it's much more readable.

As said, there are six courses on this certification.

The first course of the series, the one I am currently doing, is a Crash course on Python. Estimated time to complete about six weeks (one week per module) based on the schedule suggested by google for the course, but depending on your learning speed, it might take less.

At the end of my first week, I have completed the first three modules. I would have completed the fourth, and maybe I started the fifth if I didn't get stuck with a couple of problems along the way. Math problems are killing me.

I did the math when I was at school, but that was a long time ago. So, factorial numbers, and a bunch of other math problems made my learning week a challenge.

In 2020 Python is a language to learn. It's a general purpose language that has many use cases.
With the certification that I am taking, the goal will be use python to automate tasks that will take you forever to do manually.
Like, count how many files are in the filesystem or replace a string of text in a bunch of configuration files.

For example, my wife has millions of pictures, really cool photos by the way, but they are spread all around her computer is folders without a straightforward organization.
Reorganize all that manually will take me ages.

One of the first things I will probably do is write a script to sort and organize all the pictures.

I can't wait to start learning how to use Python to interact with the operative system.

Automate tasks is one of the many things we can do with Python, that is also popular for things like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
That will be my next goal.

So far learning Python has been quite easy for me since I already know other programming languages the basics are often similar a few differences I noticed so far:

# how functions are defined in Python.
# The importance of indentation
# the simple syntax
# how variables are defined
# the data structure
# and a new loop I never heard, recursions

While and for loops are similar to other languages but the recursion loop was entirely new to me.

If else statements and comparisons were pretty much similar to PHP or javascript, however, the syntax is much simpler.
No parentheses, no square or curly brackets. Just a colon.

The third module was a challenge. Loops are commune to many programming languages. While loops, for loops, it's not much difficult to get into that and understand how they work. However, nested loops and recursions were a bit more challenging probably because we were solving math problems that I haven't seen in a while.


At the end of each module, there is a graded assessment, and you need to score at least 80% to pass, and so far all good.

I am at the beginning of module 4, learning basic structures: strings and string methods.
Interesting to learn the indexing of a string and how you can find a character of a string by simply using square brackets (like for arrays in PHP array[0]) they are zero-based too.

Next I am going to learn about "lists", from my understanding so far they are like arrays in php and other languages, you can iterate througt them using loops.

And a completely new thing for me, which is Dictionaries. I have no clue what they are or do. We will see.

That's it for the first video of the log about learning Python with google. I'll see you next week.

? Read more about the certification here:
https://fabiopacifici.com/learn-python-google-it-automation-with-python/