LTP1: Charting my progress – Sept 2nd

Posted by memecoder on September 2, 2013
Posted in: Programming. Leave a comment

Learning to Program: The Fundamentals – Offered through Coursera (presented by University of Toronto)

Exercise 1 5% 15/15 – 5%
Exercise 2 5% 18/18 – 5%
Assignment 1 10% 42/41 – 10% *special circumstances for a score of 42
Exercise 3 5% Monday 9 September 11:59 am
Exercise 4 5% Monday 16 September 11:59 am
Assignment 2 15% Monday 16 September 11:59 am
Exercise 5 5% Monday 23 September 11:59 am
Exercise 6 5% Monday 30 September 11:59 am
Assignment 3 15% Monday 30 September 11:59 am
Exercise 7 5% Monday 7 October 11:59 am
Final Exam 25% Monday 7 October 11:59 am
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Learn to Program: Week Two

Posted by memecoder on August 31, 2013
Posted in: Programming. Leave a comment

So this week we learned:

Strings

Input/Output and str Formatting

Docstrings and Function help

Function Design Recipe

Function reuse

Visualizing Function Calls

I even tried my hand at writing a little monthly payment calculator module for calculating monthly payments for fixed payment mutual funds, it goes something like this (monthlyincome.py):

print(“Monthly Payment Calculator”)

investment = float(input(“enter investment amount: “))

NAV = float(input(“enter NAV per unit: “))

pay_per_unit = float(input(“enter payment per unit: “))

monthly_income = (investment/NAV * pay_per_unit)/12

print(monthly_income)

Here’s the visualizer: http://goo.gl/iFaiWL

Common job requirements

Posted by memecoder on August 28, 2013
Posted in: Analytics. Leave a comment

I’ve seen a lot of job postings at the firm I work for for Business Analysts.

They seem to have a lot of common requirements, here are the examples from today’s postings:

Job One: Customer Analytics and Insight 

– Highly developed analytic/problem solving skills, mathematic and database skills including knowledge of statistical concepts and predictive modeling techniques and ability to interpret complex data
– Excellent working knowledge of business-related computer software such as Access, Business Objects, (and/or SQL) Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.
– Strong communication, interpersonal and presentation skills and ability to deal with all levels of management
– Strong project management skills and the ability to manage multiple projects at the same time while meeting tight deadlines

Educational Requirements:
Required: University degree in Database Marketing, Mathematics/Statistics, Finance, Commerce, Economics, Computer Science, Information Technology or a related discipline
Preferred: Enrollment / completion of the Chartered Financial Analyst designation, Business Analysis Certificate Program (BACP) and / or equivalent post-secondary education

Job Two: Channel Measurement and Integration

Skills
The incumbent requires the following knowledge:
* Expert knowledge of sales databases (eg. Sales Hub, Sales Builder reporting database, EDW)
* Strong knowledge of business intelligence software (eg. WebFocus, SQL and SAS)
* Strong knowledge of spreadsheet and presentation software applications.
* Knowledge of technology design requirement processes to effectively interact with both business line and technical personnel.
* Knowledge of the business rule logic that generate sales and SRD credits to perform analysis and develop presentations with extracted data

Learn to Program: Week One!

Posted by memecoder on August 25, 2013
Posted in: Programming. Tagged: , . 1 Comment

Ok I admit programming is fun!

I got to play with IDLE and creating and defining my own variables, expressions, functions, etc… in Python.

Some of the exercises got us to create some little scripts to convert temperature, calculate the area and perimeter of a triangle but I let my mind run wild and did up little scripts to compute age  and distance. I was particularly proud of my mile to kilometre script as I’ve been doing a lot of distance based activities like running and walking, etc… helps in determining speed and calories burned.

Programming already yielding benefits!

I did run into a few terminology and concept issues:

1. Arguments vs Parameters

Which term to use when defining a function or performing a function call

2. Visualizing this memory address and the concept of objects

There is a great visualizer that seems to help with this conceptual issue: Python Visualizer

Learn to Program: Syllabus!

Posted by memecoder on August 19, 2013
Posted in: Programming. Tagged: , . Leave a comment

Here’s the syllabus to the course I’m taking:

Syllabus

This course provides an introduction to computer programming intended for people with no programming experience. It covers the basics of programming in Python including elementary data types (numeric types, strings, lists, dictionaries and files), control flow, functions, objects, methods, fields and mutability. Here is a tentative list of topics.

Week Topics
1 Installing Python, IDLE, mathematical expressions, variables, assignment statement, calling and defining functions, syntax and semantic errors
2 Strings, input/output, Booleans, function reuse, function design recipe, docstrings
3 import, namespaces, if statements
4 for loops, fancy string manipulation
5 while loops, lists, mutability
6 files
7 tuples, dictionaries

Python it is!

Posted by memecoder on August 15, 2013
Posted in: Programming. Tagged: , , . Leave a comment

Awhile back I remember watching a TED talk on the future of free education and a free education course provider called Coursera.

The talk was called What we’re learning from online education by Daphne Koller.

After filtering through the available courses in the computer programming field I found a course that starts on August 19th called Learn to Program: The Fundamentals.

The course is taught by Jennifer Campbell and Paul Gries at the University of Toronto but offered freely through the Coursera site.

The programming language they use for the course is Python.

So I took a leap and registered in the course. It begins on August 19th.

I also reviewed a lot of the materials on Python’s own site: Python.org

 

Seven languages in seven weeks

Posted by memecoder on August 14, 2013
Posted in: Programming. Tagged: . Leave a comment

Now I know I said that I wouldn’t venture down the road of quick help guides like Learn Java in 7 days, but I thought this resource could be useful down the road and so that’s why I’m posting it here.

Seven Languages in Seven Weeks

It’s a free book in pdf format that covers the following languages: Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby.

Now an initial glance at the languages really showed my lack of understanding in this area and the need to maybe approach the process in a more structured way.

What did like was the notion of learning a new programming language each year, an idea that seem to stem from a book called The Pragmatic Programmer.

 

 

 

 

Initial research on programming languages

Posted by memecoder on August 13, 2013
Posted in: Programming. Tagged: , , . Leave a comment

So where does one begin in developing their programming skills.

A quick look at the list of programming languages on the Wikipedia is a daunting exercise for a beginner and unless you have some sense of what you want to do with this skill you are looking to develop and this journey you want to embark on, you are lost in the multitude.

So I did a little research and found some articles that I thought I would share:

7 Programming languages on the rise

10 Programming languages that could shake up IT

Teach yourself programming in ten years

The first two articles list all sorts of programming languages to consider – From languages I’ve never even heard of like Dart, Ceylon, Go, F#, Opa, Fantom, Zimbu, X10, haXe, Chapel; to more  familiar and established languages like Python, Ruby, MATLAB, JavaScript, R, Erlang, Cobol, CUDA.

I also had to consider a lot of the job postings I’ve seen internally at the company I work for required skills in SAS, VBA, and SQL.

The last article linked above was more of a emphatic plea to take the time and learn a language and the underlying principals of computer programming. That quick solutions books like Teach Yourself Java in 7 Days or the endless variations on that theme weren’t the right approach.

Although I agreed with the article’s author for a person such as myself starting out on this voyage a little later on in life, one cannot dismiss resources in such a fashion.

There are a indeed a lot of options to consider.