Learning Python with the Programming Historian

For those humanists out there looking to learn Python to aid your research processes, the Programming Historian has a great set of lessons to get you started. The lessons are designed to teach you Python by doing the types of tasks historians might want to do. So instead of learning about managing an inventory of widgets (as is common in intro-to-programming books) you learn how to manage a set of historical sources.

The Programming Historian used to make it more obvious that these lessons were originally written sequentially, so that readers could build upon their skills slowly. It's not quite so obvious anymore because of the new way we've organised our table of contents. But for those of you interested in learning Python, or using it with students, I thought it would be helpful to post their original order here so that you can easily find your way through them.

Happy learning.

Your First Lesson

• What to do if you get Stuck (Troubleshooting) William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble

Introduction to Python

The Python programming language is flexible and learners can get impressive results quickly. If you'd like to get a fairly solid grasp on the language, the lessons here should provide you with that grounding

• Introduction and Installation William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• Mac - Python Installation William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• Windows - Python Installation William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• Linux - Python Installation William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• .
• Working with Text Files William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• Code Reuse and Modularity William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• .
• Viewing HTML Files William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• Working With Web Pages William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• .
• Manipulating Strings in Python William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• From HTML to List of Words (part 1) William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• From HTML to List of Words (part 2) William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• .
• Normalizing Data William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• Counting Frequencies William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• .
• Creating and Viewing HTML Files with Python William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• Output Data as an HTML File William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• Keywords in Context (Using n-grams) William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• Output Keywords in Context in HTML File William J. Turkel & Adam Crymble
• .
• Downloading Multiple Records Using Query Strings Adam Crymble
• .
• Installing Python Modules using Pip Fred Gibbs
• Introduction to Beautiful Soup Jeri Wieringa
• .
• Transliterating non-ASCII Characters with Python Seth Bernstein

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You may also like to supplement your learning with other tutorials. I found Mark Lutz, 'Learning Python' (O'Reilly) very useful. My co-editor, Fred Gibbs, is a big fan of the Code Academy. Use whatever combination works for you. Good luck.