01-the-big-picture

The Big Picture and Introduction to Programming

This class begins with the end by examining the code we hope to write and fully understand by the final class. After examining an example of a complete machine learning task, we'll dive into the basics in order to demystify the code.

Class Topics

• What does it mean to program a computer?
• What can programming languages do?
• Why Python? How is it different from other languages?
• Variables and data types
• Combining data with operations
• Exercise:
  • Write and run your first simple script.
  • Use a debugger to examine code examples.

Suggested Pre-reading

• Introduction to the terminal: https://www.learnenough.com/command-line-tutorial/basics
• Variables and datatypes in Python: https://thepythonguru.com/datatype-varibles/
• What is Machine Learning
  • In Brief: https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/17/103781/what-is-machine-learning-we-drew-you-another-flowchart/
  • In more detail https://towardsdatascience.com/introduction-to-machine-learning-for-beginners-eed6024fdb08