Python is one of the world’s most popular coding languages, used by some of the largest companies in the world such as Facebook, Google, Netflix and Uber. In this course, we will learn how to work with Python from a creative standpoint.
Rather than giving you just the theoretical part of what Python is, we will use Python to create scripts that you can use in your day-to-day life to automate mundane tasks.
What you’ll learn
What exactly is Python? Where would we use it and how do we get started.
How is Python structured and how do we do tasks with it
Installing third-party packages using Pip to speed up our coding time
Using Git and GitHub to store your code online so you can collaborate with others and save it securely
How to scrape content from the internet for use in data feeds using the Beautiful Soup library
How to work with image assets using the Pillow library
Requirements
A computer (Windows, Mac or Linux) with the latest version of Chrome installed and a broadband internet connection. That's all!
Target Audience
This course is aimed at creative people who are interested in learning how to write Python scripts to automate large, day-to-day tasks.
While there are a few concepts that may be familiar to designers or coders during this course, this is a beginner course so you don't need any previous experience of coding before you take part.
In the first project, we'll show you how to build a procedural generated landscape, as seen in Roblox, Minecraft and several popular Twitter accounts, using the toolsets included in Python. We'll also save our brand new emoji landscapes to a folder.
What about images? We may not only want to export things to text files! In this project, we'll use the Pillow library to alter and change images to automate common tasks, and then write our own tool to convert images to ASCII art.
Code and art can go hand-in-hand together. We'll show you how to make your own randomly generated artwork from rules that we create, and whenever we run the script, we'll get brand new, unexpected results each time!
Python has a wide range of libraries and tools that work with it. In this project, we'll use the Flask library to make a website that lets you check on the health and speed of a range of websites, and then get it live on a server with a domain!
Rik (he/him) is a Mancunian coder, teacher and CEO of SuperHi. He was the co-founder of Steer (a code school in London) and has taught several thousand people to code. He is a bit too old to be posting memes on our social media and recently featured as a Sour Patch Kid in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.