Python essentials

In this week, we will cover the essentials of Python.

Lecture slides

Note that some information in these lecture slides only apply to students from the Research Master Psychology taking the “Programming for Psychological Science” course.

Tutorials

Note that all tutorial from this week are written in Jupyter notebooks, which are meant to be used interactively. Run them online using Binder or Jupyterhub, or run them on your own computer using your own Python installation. Note that students from the Research Master are recommended to work on the UvA JupyterHub.

The first two tutorials (Introduction to Python and Python basics) will introduce you to the basics of Jupyter notebooks, Python syntax, and the concept of object-oriented programming. The next three notebooks will discuss plotting using the package matplotlib (Introduction to Matplotlib), working with tabular data using pandas (Introduction to Pandas), and working with array data using numpy (Introduction to Numpy).

The numpy tutorial is optional (i.e., its contents won’t be featured on the exam/assignments), but highly recommended for those wanting to develop more advanced data analysis skills (which are useful for, e.g., machine learning and neuroimaging research). Also, if you want some extra exercises to practice with basic Python functionality, Pandas, and Matplotlib, we recommend going through the Extra exercises notebook!

Tip

The solutions to the tutorial exercises (“ToDos”) are actually embedded in the tutorial pages on this website, but hidden by default. Click on the plus symbol next to the “Click to show” text to reveal the cell with the solution!

Let’s start with the first Python tutorial!