Prerequisite: Setting up Linux on Amazon EC2

• Setting up a Linux machine on Amazon EC2

The Basics: SSH, command-line, CURL

• How to use a terminal on Windows and Mac
• Basic Unix commands
• Retrieving latest notes from Github
• Retrieving data using CURL
• Basic web services using CURL

In class: Find Web API using Mashape, issue requests using CURL

Relational Databases

Entity-Relationship Model

• Entities, Primary Keys, and Attributes
• Relations
• Cardinality: One-to-One, One-to-Many, Many-to-Many

In class: Artist-Gallery-Painting example

From ER Diagram to SQL Tables

• Translating ER Diagrams to Tables
• SQL Statements for Creating Tables

Querying a Database Using SQL

• USE, DESCRIBE queries
• Selection queries: *, column, column AS, DISTINCT, ORDER BY, LIMIT
• Where clauses: Boolean conditions, IN, BETWEEN, LIKE
• Aggregation queries: GROUP BY, SUM, AVG, MAX, MIN, ROLLUP
• Join queries: INNER JOIN, OUTER JOIN
• Subqueries and Views

In-class Exercise: Compare Tastes Across Demographic Segments

Additional Resources

• Introduction to SQL from Khan Academy. Introductory course, with videos explaining the various aspects of SQL.
• W3Schools SQL: An introduction to SQL with hands-on examples
• Learn SQL and SQL: Analyzing Business Metrics: Two short, self-directed online course from Code Academy
• Learning MySQL: A useful textbook for those interested in learning more about SQL

Introduction to Python

Primitive Data Types

• Strings
• Integers, Floats, and Math operators
• Booleans

Complex Data Structures

• Lists
• Sets
• Tuples
• Dictionaries
• Nested data structures

Control Statements

• Conditional statements (if-then-else)
• Loops (for loops, list comprehensions)

Beyond the Basics

• Functions
• Libraries
• Files

In-class Exercise: Find Similar Company Names

Additional Resources

• Learn Python the Hard Way: A great introduction to programming and Python. It targets complete beginners, and can be tedious at times but it is universally considered one of the standard textbooks for learning Python. You can buy the print version, or read it online for free
• Code Academy, Python class: This is a useful interactive tutorial for beginners, who are trying to understand programming in general, and Python in particular
• Google’s Python class
• Official Python 2 Tutorial
• Useful iPython Notebooks: A wide variety of useful tutorials in iPython Notebooks for a wide variety of topics
• Quantitative Economics: An introduction to scientific computing using Python, by Thomas J. Sargent and John Stachurski

Regular Expressions

• Atoms
• Anchoring expressions
• Repetition and Grouping operators

In-class Exercise: Extract Email from Web Page

Web API's, Crawling & XPath

• Python and Web APIs
• Beyond the Basics: Parameters and Headers
• (advanced) Using OAuth for authentication
• XPath
• Crawling Websites

In-class Exercise: Retrieve Buzzfeed articles

Python and Databases

• Interacting with a database using Python
• Inserting data in a database using Python
• Retrieving data from a database using Python

In-class Exercise: Retrieve live weather or Citibike data and insert in database

Processing Data using Python Pandas

Data Plotting and Visualization

Text Mining and Natural Language Processing