This section focuses on becoming familiar with general-purpose Python, making use of existing libraries, writing our first scripts, learning the basics of Git, and using the IDE. In this section, we will also lay the foundation for our projects, building pipelines to process (project 1), collect (project 2), and simulate (project 3) data.

This section comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Preparing the Workspace
• Chapter 2, First Steps in Coding – Variables and Data Types
• Chapter 3, Functions
• Chapter 4, Data Structures
• Chapter 5, Loops and Other Compound Statements
• Chapter 6, First Script – Geocoding with Web APIs
• Chapter 7, Scraping Data from the Web with Beautiful Soup 4
• Chapter 8, Classes and Inheritance
• Chapter 9, Shell, Git, Conda, and More – at Your Command