Book Image

The Python Workshop

By : Olivier Pons, Andrew Bird, Dr. Lau Cher Han, Mario Corchero Jiménez, Graham Lee, Corey Wade
Book Image

The Python Workshop

By: Olivier Pons, Andrew Bird, Dr. Lau Cher Han, Mario Corchero Jiménez, Graham Lee, Corey Wade

Overview of this book

Have you always wanted to learn Python, but never quite known how to start? More applications than we realize are being developed using Python because it is easy to learn, read, and write. You can now start learning the language quickly and effectively with the help of this interactive tutorial. The Python Workshop starts by showing you how to correctly apply Python syntax to write simple programs, and how to use appropriate Python structures to store and retrieve data. You'll see how to handle files, deal with errors, and use classes and methods to write concise, reusable, and efficient code. As you advance, you'll understand how to use the standard library, debug code to troubleshoot problems, and write unit tests to validate application behavior. You'll gain insights into using the pandas and NumPy libraries for analyzing data, and the graphical libraries of Matplotlib and Seaborn to create impactful data visualizations. By focusing on entry-level data science, you'll build your practical Python skills in a way that mirrors real-world development. Finally, you'll discover the key steps in building and using simple machine learning algorithms. By the end of this Python book, you'll have the knowledge, skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Python.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Dates and Times

Many programs will need to deal with dates and times, and Python comes with multiple modules to help you handle those effectively. The most common module is the datetime module. The datetime module comes with three types that can be used to represent dates, times, and timestamps. There are also other modules, such as the time module, or the calendar module, which can be used for some other use cases.

datetime.date can be used to represent any date between the years 1 and 9999. For any date/time outside of this range, you would need to use more specialized libraries, such as the astropy library.

You can create a datetime.date by passing the year, month, and day, or get today by just calling datetime.date.today():

import datetime
datetime.date.today()

The output is as follows:

Figure 6.6: Representation of a date object

The output format for time is similar; it takes hour, minute, second, and microsecond. All of them are optional and...