[MUSIC] Welcome to the course. I'm happy to have you here and I hope you are excited to be here. In this course, we're going to learn about some of the core Python data representations that will allow us to process text. So by the end of this course, you're going to be able to read text from a file, process it, and write text back to a file. So that's where we're going. Now, I assume they are coming to us from our previous course, Python Premiere Essentials. If so, then you have all the background you need to be successful here. If you didn't take that course with us, I do encourage you to go look over the material that's covered there, make sure you feel comfortable with it so you can succeed here. In this video, I'm going to give you a brief overview of the general structure of the course, so that you can see how we're going to go about things. If you did take our previous course, it's all going to be pretty familiar to you, all right? If not, well, that's the point of the video here to make sure that you do feel comfortable. So let's take a look. Given that you're watching this video, you have obviously already found the course website. But I want to walk through a few things with you anyway, right? So the course covers four weeks. And effectively, every week, we'll have a very similar structure. So here we are looking at Week 1. There are three components to each week. The first part is the core materials here. And you can see that these are videos and readings that we'll teach you the core material that you need to know for that week, all right? So you need to watch these videos and read the readings, okay? Part two is programming tips and practice, and those will be different each week. There'll be some tips to help you become a better programmer, and practice exercises to help you solidify the materials and concepts that are being taught that week. I strongly recommend that you go through these practice exercises, and make sure that you do understand what we've been teaching in the core materials. And then finally, the third component of every week will be a graded assessment. Now on most weeks, that will be a quiz that will allow you to get feedback, and understand how well you've internalized the material for that week. Now, the fourth week will be slightly different. We'll still have the same three components in that week. It's just that the assessment will be a programming project where you will create your own Python program. And you will have to utilize all of the skills that we've taught throughout the course. And that will give you a chance to put everything into practice, and see how we can use these ideas in order to actually create Python programs. Now, I hope you'll become comfortable and familiar with the structure and rhythm of the course quite quickly, and that's one of the reasons why we try to keep the four weeks structured basically the same. But I do want to call your attention to the fact that there are some other resources that you can take advantage of as you go through the course. So if we look over here, there are also discussion forums that you can go to. If we look here at the top of the week's page, there's also a link directly to this discussion form for that week as well. So I do encourage you if you have questions, if something's not clear, you want to have a discussion with other people, to go to the discussion forms and to talk about any elements that you would like to that are related to the course. There is also a resource page that I want to call your attention to. And I strongly encourage you to read through these resources that has information that can be useful as you go through out the course. In particular, there are things about Python that might not be covered specifically in the material, like coding style and standards that we expect, and some errors that you might encounter when you're programming that are covered on these resources pages. So do make sure that you take a look if you have a question, so that you can see if there's something that already covers it. I'm excited to have you here in the course, and I know Joe is too. Hopefully, after watching this video, you have a better understanding of the structure of the course, and it makes sense to you. Each week, we first present you the material for that week. Then we give you some practice problems and exercises to allow you to internalize that material. And then finally, we assess that you've learned that material. And this process repeats each week allowing you to build up your knowledge as the course progresses, so at the end, you'll be able to write some interesting Python programs. Hopefully, you're excited to get started, so go ahead and dive right in and start watching some videos.
