Data Collection and Processing with Python

Overview

Class Central Tips

This course teaches you to fetch and process data from services on the Internet. It covers Python list comprehensions and provides opportunities to practice extracting from and processing deeply nested data. You'll also learn how to use the Python requests module to interact with REST APIs and what to look for in documentation of those APIs. For the final project, you will construct a “tag recommender” for the flickr photo sharing site.

The course is well-suited for you if you have already taken the "Python Basics" and "Python Functions, Files, and Dictionaries" courses (courses 1 and 2 of the Python 3 Programming Specialization). If you are already familiar with Python fundamentals but want practice at retrieving and processing complex nested data from Internet services, you can also benefit from this course without taking the previous two.

This is the third of five courses in the Python 3 Programming Specialization.

Syllabus

Nested Data and Nested Iteration

In week one the video lectures and activities from the Runestone textbook will cover more complex data structures. By the end of this week, you will have learned how to process json formatted data, traverse nested data using nested iteration, and extract values from nested data.

Map, Filter, and List Comprehensions

In week two you will be learning more advanced forms of accumulation. By the end of the week, you will have learned how to use the map and filter functions in combination with functions to transform or filter out data and store the resulting data in a new object. You will have also learned how to accumulate data using a list comprehension.

Internet APIs

In week three you will learn how to request data from the internet using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). By the end of the week, you will have learned how to access data from a few APIs, cache data that you have requested, and also learned how to read and work with other APIs that were not touched on in the module.