Programming Python in Action

Python is an easy to learn, easy to read programming language widely used in scripting and application development. It's flexible and interpretive nature provides immediate feedback to users, making it one of the most popular programming languages today. Explore the roots of the Python language and discover its significant features. Examine the differences between versions 2 and 3 of Python and the process of migrating to the newer version. Delve into the new features that have been packed into subsequent releases of Python 3 and see how these can be adopted to build better applications. Finally, learn some of the best practices when it comes to building applications with Python - from the right syntax to improve readability to making your code easy to extend.

Desktop apps have been replaced by web applications in many cases, but remain widely used in many areas such as financial applications. Building desktop apps in Python is an important skill for many quantitative developers and financial data modelers. Python has many great libraries to create desktop applications including Tkinter, PyQt, and wxWidgets. You will focus on the Tkinter library which is a wrapper over the Tk library. Start this course by understanding some benefits and limitations of desktop applications. Explore some commonly-used libraries for GUI programming in Python, including PyQt, wxWidgets and PySimpleGUI, and contrast their strengths and weaknesses. After that, you will explore the Tkinter library. As you shall learn, this is a wrapper over the Tk library, which in turn is a wrapper of sorts over the tcl programming language. Tcl is a high-level programming language used to create Desktop GUIs. Explore the app you aim to build with Tkinter, demonstrating the use of database connectivity, interactive plotting widgets, as well as a complex GUI with many different widgets. Finally, install Tkinter and get up-and-running with deploying apps. To round out this course, you will create a simple app with a clock text label which automatically updates every second. After completing this course, you'll be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses of various Python UI libraries including Tkinter, PyQT, and wxWidgets and be ready to configure interactive widgets such as buttons and text entries.

Widgets such as buttons, labels, and user-entry fields for input form the core of any GUI. Tkinter includes button, entry, and label objects and geometry managers in Tkinter allow you to choose how to position your widgets. You will begin this course by creating an interactive button widget which displays an exit prompt when clicked. Discover how to instantiate text entry widgets where users enter text input to a box. Set up an app where the user enters obscured password credentials into a text entry widget and submits them using a button widget. Finally, explore the grid, pack, and place geometry managers in Tkinter. Upon completion of this course, you will be able to configure interactive widgets in Tkinter and choose between place, pack, and grid geometry managers to optimize app layout.

File dialogs are powerful and versatile widgets that allow the user to navigate their local file system and upload a file, which can then be processed by the app. Tkinter offers file dialog functionality out-of-the-box and includes the tree view widget which can be used to represent either tabular or hierarchical data. Begin this course by creating Tkinter applications using an inheritance-based approach where you extend built-in Tkinter classes. Explore the tree view widget where you will represent simple tabular data in a tree view, create an app that displays the data in a Pandas data frame, and add scroll bars to a tree view. Finally, learn how to allow users to navigate and choose files using an upload file dialog, create a file picker, and add various dialogs and alerts related to the user's choice. Upon completion of this courses, you'll know how to allow an app to accept user uploaded files, validate and store files in a pandas data frame, and display the contents using a tree view.

Buttons are useful widgets but they occupy screen real estate even when not being clicked and often clutter the UI of an app. Menus are a natural and popular choice to mitigate these weaknesses of buttons. Combining menus with visualization libraries such as Seaborn and databases such as MySQL can help you build a fully functional data analysis app in Python. Begin by adding menu bars to your app and link up actions to these menu bar items. Add a Seaborn line plot to your app which will allow the user to visualize the commodity price data they uploaded. You will then set up MySQL and run SQL code from the MySQL command line. Next, create a database that you will later connect to from an app, and load data from a file on your computer. Finally, you'll create an archive database to store old data and connect to MySQL from your app. After completing this course, you'll be able to add menus and menu items to a Tkinter app and leverage MySQL for database connectivity and Tkinter for visualizing data by integrating it with Seaborn.

Displaying data using a tree view is useful, but even more useful are interactive tree views which perform actions in response to user inputs, such the selection of an item or a double-click on an item. Financial data is usually sensitive, so login and sign-up pages are great ways to authenticate a user of an app. Begin this course by adding an item-selection event handler to a tree view and create a similar stub handler for the double click. Discover how to modularize your code into different code files. After the modularization, confirm that the app is still functional. Then, you will add login and sign-up pages to the app. Finally, you will make an important change to the app by equipping it to figure out the schema of the relevant database table on the fly by referencing schema and metadata information. After completing this course, you will know how the tree view reacts to user actions, make the tree view robust to changes in the database schema, and add register and sign-in functionality to support authenticated data access.

web2py is a powerful and popular Python web application development framework firmly built on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm, a popular design pattern often used for building user interfaces (UIs). A popular alternative to Django - another popular full-stack web framework - web2py offers an easy setup and a built-in integrated development environment (IDE). In this course, explore the fundamentals of web requests and responses, examine how web browsers and web servers interact, and identify the role of HTML and HTTP. Next, learn how web apps are created with frameworks and examine important Python web development frameworks such as Django, Flask, molten, and web2py. After that, compare web2py and Django and learn web2py's strengths and limitations. Finally, examine the web2py workflow, practice building your first simple web2py app, and explore the directory structure and support available for multiple languages and translation.

web2py relies heavily on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm. The controller holds business logic in a web2py app, and the view file consists of HTML and has embedded Python code in the form of web2py template language. In this course, learn how to create your own web2py app. Start by working with the index view and About page, practice editing apps from your local machine using a familiar text editor, and compare the mapping between your machine's file structure and the web2py app directory structure. Next, examine the relationship between the controller and views, explore dictionaries and the view.html file, and identify important global variables such as response, request, db, and session. After that, explore session and request variables and how sessions are supported out of the box in web2py. Finally, learn how to deploy a simple app to a third-party web server such as PythonAnywhere.

Database connectivity is a crucial part of any full-stack web application and is the most convenient manner to persistently store data like user login credentials. web2py is built on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm with the model focused on connecting to databases and managing data in external sources. In this course, study the role of the model in web2py apps. Investigate the db.py file and learn how to integrate MySQL with web2py while using the MySQL database as a backend for your web apps. Next, explore how to install the MySQL server and MySQL Workbench tool, and practice integrating web2py with these technologies. Finally, work with the SQLFORM.grid widget, which is an extremely powerful and simple way to work with data from the model and incorporate it into your app.

For full-stack web developers, frameworks like web2py help you construct all of the business logic and get the wiring and the app details right. When it comes to app appearance and aesthetics, it's wise to rely on powerful frameworks like Bootstrap. Bootstrap helps you build sophisticated user interfaces (UIs) using design templates that incorporate both CSS and JavaScript code for typography, forms, buttons, etc. In this course, explore prebuilt Bootstrap templates and examine how to modify one to fit your use case. Then, learn how to set up a real-world web app for an e-commerce store built atop the Bootstrap functionality. Finally, learn how to allow users to register and sign in to your app, and identify the differences in the views presented to the admin user, a signed-in user, and a user who isn't signed in.

When it comes to creating fully-fledged, professional-looking e-commerce web applications, there are a lot of little details that come into play. For instance, it's important to have functionality such as a shopping cart, or perhaps the ability for a user to browse the category of merchandise they may be interested in. In this course, learn how to add product creation functionality for the admin of the e-commerce site. Then, practice implementing a shopping cart using foreign key constraints. Next, identify how to use web2py decorators such as a login decorator to ensure that a user has to log in before they can view certain functionality. Finally, examine how to add in filtering functionality so your users can select the category of products to browse.

AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service, meaning that it allows you to execute code when a specific event occurs, and abstracts the burden of maintaining infrastructure from you, the developer. Lambda functions are extremely powerful, but generally best-suited for lightweight interactive applications. Explore serverless computing and the benefits of AWS Lambdas. Discover the AWS Lambda dashboard and deploy a lambda function using Python runtime. Practice using blueprints and investigate the role of AWS Identity and Access Management in the successful outcome of a lambda function. Finally, configure a new REST API trigger through the API gateway service and expose that REST API using the curl utility. When this course is completed, you will recognize the roles and policies required for a lambda to run, and be able to create, deploy, and test lambda functions.

A major benefit of using AWS Lambda is that you can easily integrate with other powerful AWS services like the Elastic Container Registry (ECR), AWS Simple Email Service (SES), DynamoDB, or Simple Notification Service (SNS). Learn how to deploy a lambda function based off a Docker container image and upload it to AWS via the ECR. Explore adding functionality to your lambda so that it can connect to Twitter. Modify your lambda to write out tweets to an S3 bucket and send automated emails. Finally, create a lambda function that triggers on a notification from an SNS and write out the contents of that notification to a DynamoDB table. Upon completion of this course, you will be able to easily deploy lambda functions as container images and seamlessly integrate AWS Lambda with ECR, SES, DynamoDB, and SNS.

Final Exam: Python in Action will test your knowledge and application of the topics presented throughout the Python in Action track of the Skillsoft Aspire Programming Python in Action Journey.