GEOG 4560 - Introduction to Python Programming

Course Description

Computational skills of practitioners are in increasing demand in contemporary research in analytical geography. Advances in spatial data analysis have also largely outpaced the capabilities of standard statistical software. At the same time, the multidisciplinary nature of the spatial sciences often translates into the need to deal with disparate data sources, formats, and programming languages. As such, students undertaking research are often confronted with a daunting set of tasks that are seldom covered in an integrated fashion in course work. This course is designed to address this situation. It introduces geography students to basic computational concepts using Python, an object-oriented scripting language, for data processing, analysis, and application development in geographic research. It is aimed at providing students with skill sets that are in high demand within academic GIScience and commercial GIS development.

Course Objectives

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Master the fundamentals of writing Python scripts.
• Write Python functions to facilitate code reuse.
• Make their code robust by handling errors and exceptions properly.
• Develop python programs for data manipulation.

Software

Python 3, Anaconda 3, Jupyter Notebook, Git/GitHub, Visual Studio Code