working directory

I started playing around building a Tagging Engine in Python using Lists but now I’ve studied a bit more – particularly Dictionaries – I want to see how I can perfect what I was working on. Here are a couple of key things I added/changed in this program over the version I was working on earlier.

1. Using a dictionary instead of lists for faster counting and simpler recall. This is straight forward, using the get method as taught by Dr. Chuck (see Coding 101 part 7 for more details).

words = dict()
for word in wordlist :
____if word in excluded : continue
____words[word] = words.get(word,0) + 1

A word before I begin
You can do no better in learning Python programming for data handling/analysis than to study for yourself one of Charles Servance’s MOOC’s, or to download and work through his freely-available, ‘remixed’ open-source book (see References below for links to both). I am not even standing of the shoulders of giants here… I am merely scurrying along way behind them all, picking up what few crumbs of knowledge and wisdom I can along the way. Blogging my own educational journey – as a 40-somthing woman heading into the world of tech – is a way to help me consolidate my own learnings. If it can help you too – above all by showing empirically that “if she can, then I can” – it will have served a double purpose. [Read more…]