This is a repository for a workshop presented by the Madpy Python Meetup Group. Our goal is to provide a friendly introduction to programming in Python and how it can be used on public data.
Knowing Python is not a prerequisite. It helps if you are familiar with command line/terminal applications. All we ask is you that you bring your curiousity about data.
Installing Python can be overwhelming for a beginner, because there are many options and versions.
You should install Python version 3 (not 2). Note that MacOS and most linux distributions usually come with Python 2 installed.
The two ways I'd recommend are:
- download it directly from python.org
- obtain a distribution like Anaconda use a package manager like miniconda.
Anaconda is a popular option because the full version provides a GUI for managing your environments, and it has prepackaged Python environments that have all the most popular packages preinstalled.
Once you have your Python environment you can run pip install <package name> to install a package. The only requirements for this tutorial are jupyter and pandas.
So:
pip install jupyter pandas
The Anaconda distribution would already have the appropriate packages installed.
We will be exploring the Police Incident Reports dataset from the City of Madison Open Data website. You can download the .csv file here.
The workshop consists of a Jupyter notebook. Run jupyter notebook to start the jupyter application and navigate to the notebook.