Author Archives: Manuel Madrigal

In this mastery I will explain how to create and use lists in Python.

In the screen capture above we can observe how a list called “numbers” is created but with no elements in it, the elements are added one by one by the user input using the statement  “append” which add the element at the very end of the list.

But lists arent always created in blank, creating a list is as simple as putting different comma-separated values between squere brackets. For example:

list1 = ['physics', 'chemistry', 1997, 2000];

list2 = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ];

list3 = ["a", "b", "c", "d"];

Lists are very useful to store values that you can use later for other purposes.

You can learn more about lists here: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_lists.htm

#TC1014 #mastery23

In mastery 21 I explained what a recursion is, and as I said before, a recursion helps our code to look cleaner and easier for other users to understand, but it is not always the best option to use.

If we want our code to look better yes, but some times we have to make it longer in order to be more effective, what do I mean by that?

For example, if we did code fore an airbag of a car, this code must be as faster as it can, everything has to happen in miliseconds or even nanoseconds if possible.

Here is an example of 2 different functions that do the same thing..

In the first function we can notice that it is using recursion which looks shorter and easier to understand, but the second function, even if it looks rare, it is more effective and it can solve the function faster.

#TC1014 #mastery22

In this mastery I will explain you what is a recursion in a repetitive algorithm.

Recursions are very simple and they are very useful to make your code cleaner.

As in the screen capture above we can observe that a recursion occurs when you use a function inside the same function, it may sound weird but once you see the example you will see that it is not that difficult.

In this case the recursion is used in order to get to the more simple values and it works as a loop that stop until it get to the last value.

#TC1014 #mastery21

The syntax of the for loop may be different from other for loops you have used in other languages. For python the syntax is the following:

     for i in range(x):

where “i” is just a variable that will be changing its value each time the loop is completed, and x is the number of times the loop is going to be repeated.

In this case I used “range” as the way of the for loop to recognize how many times it has to loop, but we can use the for loop to go over certain values from a list, as in the red circled statement of the screen capture above.

You can learn more about For loops in here: https://wiki.python.org/moin/ForLoop

#TC1014 #mastery20

For this mastery I will explain you how to import and use a module in Python.

A module is like a library that contains certain functions that belong to a particular class, for example, in the screen capture above we can see how to import the module statistics, a module that contains functions for this specific area.

The syntax of importing is just using the word “import”and the name of the module you want to import.

Alfo there is another way to import just a part of the module whis is using the statement “from”. For example if we wanted to just import a specific function of the module, we would use the statement “from” followed by the name of the module, and then the statement “import” followed by the name of the function.

To use a function from the module we imported we have to assign it to a variable, but first we type the name of the module. the name of the function we want to use and in parentheses the variable to which we want to apply the function.

You can check an example on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZlKCdybZrA

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In this mastery Im going to explain how to call a function in Python, which is very easy to do.

To call a function you just have to type the name of it followed by the parameter you are going to introduce in that function. Also you can assign the function to a variable so it takes the output of the function.

For example, if we see the screen capture below we can notice that the function “fact” with the parameter “x” is assigned to the variable “y”, so “y” will take wathever value is returned from the function and then we can use “y” to acomplish some other tasks along our program.

You can visit this site to learn more about calling functions: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_functions.htm

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For this mastery im going to explain how to create a function in Python, which is very simple.

You can see in the screen capture above the syntax, which is composed by the word “def” followed by the name you are giving the function and the argument of this one, also, dont forget to put the tho dots at the end. In the following lines you have to define what your function is going to do, and this can vary depending of the functionality of this.

The statement return is the output of the function, is what the function is going to return the user with a giving parameter.

 Also you can check for more information here: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_functions.htm

#TC1014 #mastery12

For this mastery I had to Install Linux on my computer. After searching a little on the internet I found this option where I had to install first Virtual Box (here is the link: https://www.virtualbox.org/) and then I had to download Ubuntu (which is Linux). You can Download Ubuntu for free here: http://www.ubuntu.com/download.

Also you can check this video where is explained step by step how to install it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpgjBIGl9RU

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