before getting started, asking about recording and editing meetings on zoom.

It is in correspondence to a broad environment that programming ai is trending and particularly under the financial industry, called out by rob yesterday, that learning and grasping certain programming skills like python and r is widely and maybe mandatory required. So I assume you guys gals are also motivated to take action on this route.

The great aspect of taking on this journey is that 1, it’s easy to learn even without any theoretical training on math computer science, and 2. the internet is flooded with numerous resources, schools, videos, books, free classes, the latter point comes hand in hand with the downside which is that you may feel overwhelmed and even drown in ocean of resources. You jumps from this tutorial to the next but still stuck on maybe a very tiny minor issue such as installing a module, a package got failed. To make things more painful, this area advances so rapidly that some commands,syntax that works a few months ago may crash on you when you try now. So I think me taking half an hour every week to hand-holdingly guide your through this journey would be quite useful for you.

Rob mentioned both Python and R, and I myself migrated from R to Python. the reason is that R is only good at data analysis, while Python is much more versatile, there are two packages – numpy and pandas making Python absolutely not less superior to R with respect to data analysis, more over, Python can be used for far more than data analysis, you can use it for graphic design, animation, web app construction such as linkedin, and game creation.

pause to ask feedbacks, thoughts.

I’ve made tons of mistakes, and wasted time on multiple tutorials, hence I cherry pick the most authoritative source – python.org as our referencing textbook. I also would like to use Wes McKinny’s book for data analysis as a parallel guidebook. Unfortunately the version is old.

Sorting out books/guides, then we need to roll up sleeves and get hands dirty. the very first step is of course to install the executable Python.

Next we need to decide with IDE/GUI or interface you want to operate on. There are so many ways but in the begining, it’s better to fixate on one that is most easy and simple. Jupyter book if you’ve heard, are more predominantly popular esp. financial data analysis. so I will go with Jupyter, even myself, I prefer the VS code IDE. that is quite a powerful tool but packed with too many gadgets, extension, supporting language that for novice learning puprose, it’s not a recommendable option.

So try to install jupyter notebook.

once it’s installed, pull up the operating bench, and type in certain lines.

import sys, sys.version, sys.version_info, sys.path
import os, os.getcwd(), os.chdir(‘c:\users\ncarucci\amd’)

When the students are trying to install jupyter, the encounter issue pip install jupyterlab didn’t work. The solution is that first make sure globalprotect is disabled, then setting the environment variable by

:\Users\dbatayola>setx PATH “C:\Users\dbatayola\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38\Scripts;%PATH%”

then type

pip3 install Jupyterlab
Jupyter Notebook

python environment variable
pythonhome, when is set to single directory, the location of the standard python libraries, defaulting to /usr/local
pythonpath, augment the default search path for module files. the search path can be manipulated from within a python program as teh variable sys.path:

sys.path.append(“/My/Path/To/Module/Directory”)sys.path.append(“C:\\Users\\ncarucci\\Documents\\Python Scripts\\PAAPI\\Engines Python SDK v2 2.0.0”)