DTU Course 02820: Python Programming

Practical information

Time: Mondays 13:00 – 17:00
Location: Building 341 room 23 ("Lokaleoversigt")
Lecturer: Finn Årup Nielsen
DTU kursusbasen: På Dansk or In English
CampusNet: 02820 Python Programming E12
Deltagerliste (participants)
Python wiki (deprecated)

Tentative schedule for autumn 2012

Introduction to the course, installation and introduction to Python
[ Introduction to the course PDF of slides | Wikiversity Python quiz (Introduction, permalink, Campusnet evaluation) | A case | Installation PDF of slides | Wikiversity Python quiz (Introduction, permalink, Campusnet evaluation) ]
Introduction to Python
- Introduction to Python PDF of slides
- Encoding PDF of slides
- Wikiversity Python quiz: Basic data types, Campusnet evaluation
- Wikiversity Python quiz: Functions & classes, Campusnet evaluation
- Exercises (ishashad, dictionary, recursion, classes, file reading, encoding & project Euler): Campusnet evaluation
Numerical Python: "Python as Matlab". Numpy, Scipy, matplotlib, ...
Databasing, text and Web mining and Python
[ Databasing | Text and web mining | string.txt | email.zip | email.tar ]
GUI and Web serving
[ GUI | Web serving | (Semantic web) | (Machine learning ) ]
Project work for the rest of the time.
Project presentations (monday before autumn vacation)
Exam: December 2011 Building 321, floor 100 Thursday 13th December 2012 starting from 9.00-17:00. (Studiehåndbogen)
Report hand-in deadline: Thursday 13th December 2012 23:59.

Exercises
Previous years slides:
[ Databases and Unicode | CGI and urllib ]

Course material

There are no fixed course material for the project, but we recommend a number of books and other material:

The Python Tutorial.
Mark Pilgrim (2004) Dive into Python. A good and free introduction to Python. Basic Python, Unit testing, XML, regular expressions, etc.
Allen Downey (2002-2008) Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. GFDL license. Covers the basics of the Python language and Tkinter GUI.
Hans Petter Langtangen (2008) Python Scripting for Computational Science. Available as a e-book through the DTU library. Covers basic Python, numerical (NumPy and SciPy), combining Python and C, CGI and GUI programming.
Vidar Bronken Gundersen (2006) MATLAB commands in numerical Python (NumPy). Indispensable if you are trained in the Matlab or R languages as this short note provides a concise Rosetta stone between Python, Matlab and R. Probably good even if you do not have knowledge of Matlab and R.
Internet search engine, e.g., "Python tutorial" and "Python introduction"

Extra:

Toby Segaran (2007), Programming Collective Intelligence. A commercial book with Python examples in machine learning for Web 2.0 applications, e.g., naïve Bayes classifier and non-negative matrix factorization. Polyteknisk Boghandel: 279 kroner (2012)
Steven Bird et al. (2009), Natural Language Processing with Python. Describes the NLTK Python package and written by the developers of this nice language processing toolkit. Also available under a Creative Commons licence from https://sites.google.com/site/naturallanguagetoolkit/book. Polyteknisk Boghandel.
Mitchell L. Model, Bioinformatics Programming Using Python: Practical Programming for Biological Data. Probably recommendable for people interested in bioinformatics. Covers basic Python presented with problems from bioinformatics. Also web and database programming. Polyteknisk Boghandel: 469 kroner (2012).
Toby Segaran, Colin Evans og Jamie Taylor (2009), Programming the Semantic Web. Specialized book about the Semantic Web and how Python can be used in that context. Polyteknisk Boghandel: 275 kroner (2012).
Alex Martelli (2005), Python Cookbook. Shows good code examples. Not so good as an introductory book. Polyteknisk Boghandel
Ivan Idris (2011), NumPy 1.5 Beginner's Guide. As the name implies: A beginner's guides to NumPy.

Evaluation

You are evaluated on the written report, the printed poster and the oral poster presentation. The grade will be based on an overall combined assessment. So do not expect to get a grade or "points" after the poster presentation. You will first get the grade after we have evaluated the reports together with the poster presentation.

Report

The report should contain:

Use a template: this latex template (IEEE style with 10 point font size) or similar in style. Please do not squizze the font size or layout beyond the style file.
Information on first page: name, study number, title.
Your programming code in an appendix. You may exclude code that contains excessive GUI-setup, long wordlists, etc.
You are allowed to use code that you found on the Internet (provider that the author distributes it under a suitable license such as BSD or GPL), but remember to give full and clear attribution to the author. Any text citations should also be fully referenced and in quotation marks. Paraphrased citations should also be fully referenced.

There are length requirements for the report:

One-person report: 2 pages
Two-persons report: 3 pages
Three-persons report: 4 pages

This limit does not apply for the appendix, which can be any page length. The appendix may contain code and automated generated content, e.g., from Epydoc, pylint results or other.

The text and the code should be included as text, rather than as images, so the plagiarization detection system can read it. The report could contain, e.g.:

Discussion of the design of the program
Description of the implementation.
Table or graphical overviews of modules and/or classes
Database schema description
Description of central parts of the code
Screenshots of the program
Plots of results
Plots of code performance
...

When looking into the code in the report apart from the actual functionality we may possibly examine the below items:

How well-structured it is (modules/classes/functions)?
Is it effective? Does it use the Python language constructions effectively? For example sometimes you can avoid a standard "for" loop writing it the code a single line. Vectorized NumPy operations might be faster than standard Python, see, e.g., my blog post.
Is it secure? In a web application you should sanitize input and escape during output. If your program receives strange input does it crash?
Is the code documented? A structured way would use the __doc__ variable and, e.g., pydoc. See the "documentation" part of the introduction slides
Is the code tested? Are errors and exceptions handled well. You have likely run the program and seen that it works. A more structured approach would also utilize some of the testing functionality in Python. See "Testing" part of the introduction slides.
Is the coding "nice looking" and consistent? For inspiration see Style Guide for Python Code.

Poster

The poster shows the design of the program and "results" e.g., screen shots or plots and it must be self-contained. On the top, the poster must contain title, names of students, course title and date. Examples on posters can be seen in building 321, 1. floor (Note that some of the posters are not from the Python course). The external examiner will attend the presentation of the posters and will receive the final report.

We are able to print posters in up to A0 landscape format (w=1189mm, h=841mm) as the largest. If you opt for this possibility, please email a PDF file in sufficient resolution to Finn Kuno Christensen (or Erik Poulsen) - with the email: print (a) imm. dtu. dk. 12:00 the day before the exam. Specify whether you want the poster in A1 or A0. Note that if you all queue up on that hour there might be a problem. The printer room is in the cellar of building 305 and Kuno and Erik are in the library in room 053 (the cellar between building 305 and 321).

As an alternative you can print the poster on multiple A4 sheets on glue it on a post board or hang them next to each other on the pin board we have.

There are no rules about the size of the poster, but A3 will probably be too small. A1 is preferable and the default.

A hint: A standard issue with presenting material on a poster is that one tends to put too much text on the poster. Better it is to have good drawings, diagrams or plots.

Poster presentation

For the poster presentation the two- and three-men teams should each give a five minute presentation, while a one-man "teams" should prepare a presentation between 5 and 10 minutes. After the presentation we (teachers and censor) will ask questions.

In a group each participant should present a part of the project/poster, i.e., each participant should not present the entire project/poster.

Note that each participants presentation and answers to questions need to be individual. This is not a group exam and we may direct individual questions to one of you in the group, - and the others should not answer.

A hint: It will be a good idea to rehearse exactly what you are going to say at the poster presentation.

You can demonstrate the program on the computer. It might give us a nice impression. The risk is that you cannot make the computer work or that it will take too much time to setup and draw attention away. If you choose to also demonstrate the program on a computer, be sure to rehearse that along with the oral presentation.

You should expect that other students follow around and listen while you a given a presentation. You are welcome to follow around and listen to the other students while the they present.