Five Python Tricks You Need to Know Today
Whether you are a senior AI engineer or a first-year biology student, you will come across the Python programming language at some point. First released in 1991, Python has quickly become the favorite language used by programmers and technologists. Based on Stack Overflow question views in high-income countries, Python is found to be rapidly becoming the most popular language of choice.
Being a high-level, interpreted language with a relatively easy syntax, Python is perfect even for those who don’t have prior programming experience. Popular Python libraries are well integrated and used in diverse fields such as bioinformatics (biopython), data science (pandas), machine learning (keras/ tensorflow) and even astronomy (astropy). After learning C and Java as my first programming languages, I was able to teach myself Python within weeks of googling it. Despite executing much slower than Java and other languages, Python actually improves productivity by having well-built process integration features.
Before we get started, I highly recommend you to check out Dan Bader’s Python Tricks Book. In his book, Dan has shared some really informative tips and tricks about how to code more efficiently in Python. If you do not know Python at all, I highly suggest you to get started with Code Academy’s Learn Python interactive course.
