I have not found this third week particularly easy. I found that Notebook 04.5 particularly time consuming. I am not sure quite where the authors of the course got their timings from but I thought that the following was a bit optimistic:
"Activity 4.5 Notebook - 30 minutes"! At the end, it presents you with a list of tasks:
- a) Show a count of the number of sales records for each District.
- b) Show a count of the number of sales records for each Team in each District, including the Team and District margin totals.
- c) Show the total sales value for each Team in each District summed over the year.
- d) Show the total sales value for each Team Member in each District over the year, showing the District and Team member margin totals. (Remember you need the team name and salesperson name to identify each person uniquely.)
- e) Show a bar chart of the number of sales each month.
- f) Show a bar chart of the total sales each month.
- g) Show a scatter plot showing the Item Cost v. the number of Units in each record.
- h) Add a Season column to the DataFrame. For each sale record, the value for Season will be derived from the month: (11,12,1) are Winter, (2,3,4) are Spring, (5,6,7) are Summer, (8,9,10) are Autumn. From the sales in each Season calculate the number, average, maximum, minimum and total sale amount over the season (that is, from all the sales records grouped by season report the number of records, and the average, maximum, minimum and total sales amounts).
These would prove to take me 1 1/2 hours on their own and I never did finish so quite where the 30 minutes for the whole notebook came from, I have no idea. Perhaps one of the course authors timed themselves? Anyway, I think that you would need to be very adept at Python and pandas to achieve the time.
I left that notebook and tackled the next one - about Regular Expressions. I found this not quite so difficult but it did require some careful thinking. By this time, I was getting quite depressed about my chances of even getting to do TMA01, let alone complete it and continue. Fortunately, there was a post on the forum which set me back on the path of confidence (well - a bit). Someone mentioned that there wasn't an exam at the end so we had no need to have everything welded into our brains and that we could manage throughout by referring back to the course notes. A sign of understanding and relief was heard in my household.
On that basis, I tackled the first part of TMA01 and found that I could manage quite well! So, onward and upwards, as the saying goes.
I have been writing successful software for the last 35 years - some of it in mission critical situations such as bank currency trading rooms and so on. This has been done in Basic, which was taught to me by the OU in M251 An algorithmic approach to computing (in 1977), in UCSD Pascal (which was the OU's next teaching language and, finally, Smalltalk - which was the OU's third teaching language (replaced by Java and now Python to some extent). In all that time I have relied heavily on having documentation to hand as I have never managed to learn by rote all of the syntax of these languages. As an aside, Smalltalk (like pandas) has a very easy syntax but an extremely rich library so I spend some time regularly looking up stuff.
The upshot is, I think, that I should assume that I will do the same with Python, pandas and Regex and not try and have it all in my brain. I have one day left to complete week 4 to maintain my one week buffer so it is eyes down tomorrow for a good stint.
One last comment. Last week, I signed up for TM354 - Software Engineering, which starts in October. I have to say that those who know me from my development background expressed opinions that this would be quite boring given my CV. I felt that it would be a reasonable step to the final project course (TM470). However, it turns out that it has an examination. Ignore what I said above as I would be quite happy to sit this if it wasn't for my stupid arthritis and the problems it brings with continuity of concentration. As a result, I cancelled the application and signed up for TM352 - Web, mobile and cloud technologies. Firstly, this doesn't have an exam component but also it ties in very nicely with my thoughts on a project for TM470. More on this later.