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# WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF PROGRAMMING
# Fear not... it's not actually as scary as it sounds
# A lot of it starts to make sense once you know the basic rules of the road
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# And Welcome to New Orleans. Laissez les bon temps roulez!
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# Let's start rolling by doing a little...math.
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# In programming, an INTEGER is a whole number.
# If a number has a decimal point, it's called a FLOAT instead.
# So let's play around with some integers.
# You can do all sorts of math on integers, just like you'd do with a calculator or in Excel.
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# In the command line Python interpreter or here in Jupyter Notebooks, these results will always show up.
# But if you run an entire Python (.py) program, however short, they won't.
# To get results to actually appear, you need to "print" them to the screen.
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# So it's good practice to get into the habit of "printing" things when you want to see the results
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# Order of operations works the same as real-world math you learned back in grade school
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# ...is different than:
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# VARIABLES
# Instead of always using actual values, we can create a VARIABLE to hold it
# It's kind of like a nickname, but much more than that.
# It stores the value and let's us do things with it.
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# Let's print to see what we get
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# Once you have a variable, you can run math on it by using its name like you would the number
# Multiplication
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# You can get as complex as you want with these...
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# You can work with powers by using two (*) together
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# You can also create more than one variable, and then do math on them
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# You can idenifty what TYPE your variable is like this
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# Are there other types? The answer - indeed!
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# One that we won't get into right now, but is useful to know about, is called a Boolean.
# It's basically a True/False choice.
# Note: Because the equal sign (=) is used for variables, to say something actually EQUALS the value of something else,
# you need to use a double equal sign (==). Like this:
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# Now let's assign this to a variable that will store the result
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# Now, let's look at another type - one of the most popular out there -- TEXT
# In programming, TEXT is referred to as a STRING
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# At its most basic, a string can be displayed like this... note the quotation marks (" ")
# Python actually doesn't care if you use single quotes or double quotes. But best to be consistent.
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# Let's create a variable assigned to a string instead.
# In Python, you don't have to declare a variable before you assign a value to it.
# Just give it a name and assign it a value using the = sign.
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#Once the variable is assigned, you can do all kinds of things with your string
#You can add other text to combine with it:
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# You can also "multiply" your string.
# Let's see what that means...
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# .upper() is one of dozens of string methods, in many ways similar to the functions you might be familiar with in Excel.
# Can you guess what it does? Yep!
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# You might notice that the .upper() method doesn't PERMANENTLY change the "variable" variable.
# We'll get to that in a minute, but watch what happens when we do this:
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# Let's lowercase the string, too
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#These work without variables at all, too, of course
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#SLICING AND DICING STRINGS
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# You can use the brackets to 'slice' out characters from a string based on their position.
# Notice in Python, that we start counting at zero. So variable[0] returns the "n" in "nicar".
# The value after the colon is the position that we stop before. So variable[0:2] returns all the characters from
# position 0 until before position 2.
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#Using a variable of course works the same way
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# Let's print the first four characters
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# Let's print everything after the second character
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# Remember when the .upper() method didn't change the variable?
# A string is IMMUTABLE.
# You can't change it in place, so if you want to change it, you have to create a NEW VARIABLE
# and assign the new value to it.
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#Another exmample - you can use replace() to do swap out part of the string for something new instead
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#But look what happens when we call mystring...
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# See what I mean? It doesn't "stick" unless you create a new variable
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#You can also use a function called split() to SPLIT a string based on a certain character
#Think about how this could be used for divded up names separated by commas:
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# Let's try to split the string on the comma...
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# Let's create a variable to hold the results of this string
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# This type looks a little different, no?
# Let's get the type
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# A list? Hmm. That's a new one.
# Because it's a LIST, we can get a specfic item by its index
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#Wait, what IS a "list"???
#Ask, and ye shall have an answer in the next session...
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# Continue to Part 2 ----->