This section is a guide to get you started with Python. Python is an open-source programming language. It is available to everyone and one of the most common and widely used programming languages worldwide. Therefore, Python has a large user base which has many advantages: Bugs are reported and fixed quickly, and there is a huge user base. For your individual problem you will easily find solutions over the supporting Python community on the internet. Lastly and probably the most prominent benefit of learning and using Python is the diversity of the great python package ecosystem. Countless well implemented, distributed and documented packages will help you to solve complex problems easily with the help of Python. In this tutorial we will not only introduce the core features and coding structures of Python, but we will also make use of commonly used packages that expand the main functionality of Python.
Originally Python was not created with the intention of inventing a new specialized programming language for statistical purposes like S or R. Python was designed as a generalistic high level programming language that can be used for all purposes comparable to C++ or Java. Nethertheless, there are a lot of powerful packages in Python especially for statistical, modelling and machine learning purposes that make Python the state-of-the-art programming language for data sciences and geospatial data analysis. The aim of this tutorial is to show you the benefits and possibilities to use Python for such purposes, but also to empower you to solve your own statistical and modelling applications with the help of Python.
Citation
The E-Learning project SOGA-Py was developed at the Department of Earth Sciences by Annette Rudolph, Joachim Krois and Kai Hartmann. You can reach us via mail by soga[at]zedat.fu-berlin.de.
Please cite as follow: Rudolph, A., Krois, J., Hartmann, K. (2023): Statistics and Geodata Analysis using Python (SOGA-Py). Department of Earth Sciences, Freie Universitaet Berlin.