Code Camp 2018

A coding primer for the GSA pathway class of 2016/17 at King's College London.

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List of Contents

Welcome! This is the repository for the interactive Jupyter notebooks that will teach you the basics of how to code in Python for Geographic Data Analysis.

The topics include:

• Notebook-1: Thinking like a Computer
• Notebook-2: The Basics
• Notebook-3: Dealing with Errors & Debugging
• Notebook-4: Truth & Conditions
• Notebook-5: Lists and Dictionaries
• Notebook-6: Dictionaries
• Notebook-7: Loops & Iteration
• Notebook-8: An Intro to Functions
• Notebook-9: Wrapping Up

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, you will have a solid understanding of:

• The rationale behind the usage of computers and computational methodologies in Geography
• The way computers "think" and "work"
• How computers programs are structured and how to execute them
• The fundamental concepts of programming (in Python, but extensible in general terms to any other programming language) such as the concept of variable, iteration, data structure, list, object, loop, function etc
• How your newly acquired coding skills can be applied to analyse and visualise data

The Jupyter Notebook format will allow you to see both the instructions, the code, and its outcome on this website, e.g.:

However, wouldn't it be much more fun and fruitful if you could actually run (i.e. execute) that code on you own machine?

To do so, you will need to:

• Download the notebooks

  • METHOD A: download the whole repository (click the green button on the top-right corner that says "clone or download") and decompress the .zip file.
  • METHOD B: if you want to have just the single notebook and not the whole repository then click on the notebook name, this will bring you to the rendered notebook. Click on 'raw', and then right-click on the web-page and 'save-as' wherever you want that file on your local filesystem

• Install Jupyter. There are various ways but the easiest one is via Anaconda (that's basically a collection of the python programming language and of it most used libraries, already bundled up for you convenience.) Follow the instructions here.

• Run the notebook! From Jupyter's web-page:

  (Windows): The Jupyter Notebook App can be launched by clicking on the Jupyter Notebook icon installed by Anaconda in the start menu (Windows) or by typing in a terminal (cmd on Windows): jupyter notebook

  (Mac OSX): Click on spotlight, type 'terminal' to open a terminal window. Enter the startup folder by typing cd /some_folder_name. Type jupyter notebook to launch the Jupyter Notebook App (it will appear in a new browser window or tab).

For a quick-primer on how to install and interact with a Jupyter Notebook follow this tutorial from OpenTechSchool

References:

The material contained in this repository is heavily inspired by the great work of Dani Aribas-Bel: Arribas-Bel, D. (2016). Geographic Data Science’15. http://doi.org/{10.5281/zenodo.46313}