4.1 Week 1 and 2 glossary
Here are alphabetical lists, for quick look up, of what this week introduced.
Programming and data analysis concepts
An assignment is a statement of the form variable = expression . It evaluates the expression and stores its value in the variable. The variable is created if it doesn’t exist. Each assignment is written on its own line.
CamelCase is a naming style in which names made of various words have each word capitalized, except possibly the first.
A comment is a note about the code. It starts with the hash sign (#) and goes until the end of the line.
A dataframe is the pandas representation of a table.
An expression is a fragment of code that can be evaluated , i.e. that has a value, like a variable name.
A file not found error occurs if the computer can’t find the given file, e.g. because the name is misspelled or because it’s in another folder.
A function takes zero or more arguments (values) and returns (produces) a value.
A function call is an expression of the form functionName(argument1, argument2, …).
An import statement of the form from module import * loads all the code from the given module.
The maximum and minimum of a set of values is the largest and smallest value, respectively.
The mean of a set of numbers is the sum of those numbers divided by how many there are.
The median of a set of numbers is the number in the middle, i.e. half of the numbers are below the median and half are above.
A method is a function that can only be called in a certain context, like a dataframe or a column.
A method call is an expression of the form context.methodName(argument1, argument2, ...).
A module is a package of various pieces of code that can be used individually.
A name is a case-sensitive sequence of letters, digits and underscores. Names cannot start with a digit. Function, variable and module names usually start with lowercase.
A name error occurs if the computer doesn’t recognize a name, e.g. if it was misspelled.
An operator is a symbol that represents some operation on one or two expressions, e.g. the four basic arithmetic operators.
The range of a set of values is the difference between the maximum and the minimum.
A reserved word cannot be used as a name. Jupyter shows reserved words in green boldface.
A statement is a command for the computer to do something, e.g. to assign a value or to import some code.
A string is a verbatim piece of text, surrounded by quotes. Jupyter shows strings in red.
A syntax error occurs if the computer can’t understand the code because it is not in the expected form, e.g. if a reserved word is used instead of a name or some punctuation is missing.
A variable is a named storage for values.
Reserved words
- from
- import
Functions and methods
max(value1, value2, …) returns the maximum of the given values.
column.max() returns the maximum value in the column.
min(value1, value2, …) returns the minimum of the given values.
column.min() returns the minimum value in the column.
column.mean() returns the mean of the values in the column.
column.median() returns the median of the values in the column.
column.sum() returns the total of the values in the column.
dataFrame.sort_values(columnName) takes a string with a column’s name and returns a new dataframe, in which rows are sorted in ascending order according to the values in the given column.
read_excel(fileName) takes a string with an Excel file name, reads the file, and returns a dataframe representing the table in the file.