For those who have never used git before (or are rusty), you should study this quick intro and cheat sheet that ChatGPT and I put together for you today.

When composing a README file, the question to ask is: if someone you’ve never met were to clone your repo and investigate it, and they read your README file as a starting point, would they know what to do? I think at a minimum, you’d need to describe what your data set is, what each…

Well, I guess there was no point in taking that end-of-class vote yesterday after all. The official UMW Room Planning People™ say that we cannot reserve room 054 for our time slot moving forward. There is a meeting in there at 3pm on some days, evidently, so we actually lucked out getting it for our…

The biggest hiccup I’ve seen students experiencing on homework #0 isn’t anything to do with data or Python, but about how to find your way around your filesystem. Here is a hopefully helpful guide for Windows and Mac users to get down these basics. (Linux users probably don’t need any help with that, but if…

Due to the heat in 025, we’ll meet in room 054 (the opposite side of the basement) instead tomorrow. One thing I can’t stand about that room is that for lectures, students tend to still sit at the tables facing the table instead of facing the instructor, which means they miss much of what’s going…

For those students unfamiliar with Pandas, I have created a Pandas cheat sheet that covers the very basics of what you need to know to be functional. Please read!

The book has plenty of lab exercises at the end of each chapter. You’re welcome to read those if you want, but you’re going to get much better practice with Python just doing the assignments for this class. All I’m really counting on you reading for chapter 2, for example, is pp.15-39.

A couple of things (which I just learned) about Windows and VS Code: You need to set the correct Python interpreter. To do this, you type Ctrl-Shift-P, then “Python: Select interpreter” and choose “Select interpreter path…”. Then, navigate to the virtual environment you created, drill down into its “Scripts” folder, and then choose python.exe. Helpfully,…

A practice assignment has been posted, and can net you up to +20XP! It’s due on September 8th.

You might not realize this from where you sit, but it’s darn challenging for professors to learn 50-75 new names and faces every semester. And that’s without dealing with jet lag complications! One of the ways I expedite learning students’ names is practicing. (Some might call this “cheating.” I call those people “haters.”) I download…