Noob Alert

Updated: 12/14/2019

It turns out that I wasn’t aware of a nifty little built in function to do something very similar when I wrote this article. I wanted to update this post to provide details on that.

If you use the built-in help function you will get very similar results to my function below. It is nearly always smarter to use a built in vs build your own so I would suggest doing this instead of what I metnion below. That said I’ll leave this up for reference to the individual attributes which might be useful in other applications

Continue reading “A Python Function to Describe another Function”

Generate a Simple Dictionary Value Summary

Today’s post will be a short post – on something I recently needed to do for a project at work. My program assigned orders to a particular disposition. The domain of the problem isn’t really relevant – but I used a dictionary with the unique order number as the key and one of several values could be the value.

I wanted to post a message, once the process had completed, to inform me of the outcome summary. How many orders got disposition A, B, C and so on.

Continue reading “Generating a Dictionary Value Summary”

Closures and Decorators in Python

This article will attempt to explain the related concepts of Closures and Decorators in the Python program language. It is essential to understand that functions, like literally everything else in Python, are, in fact, objects. As such, they can be passed to other functions as arguments. This fact opens up some interesting possibilities (such as the concept of closures and decorators).

It is critical to have a handle on closures to understand decorators, so we will start there.

Continue reading “Closures and Decorators”

Objectives Of This Post

Continuing my Python Series (see my first post here and second one here), I went through how to use List, Set and Dictionary Comprehensions, in Python, to replace loops that generate collections of items. In this post, we will explore Lambdas.

What Are Lambdas?

A Lambda Function is a concise way to define a limited anonymous function in Python. Here is an example of an identity function as a standard python function, and then the same function expressed as a Lambda function.

Continue reading “Lambdas”

Objectives Of This Post

Continuing my Python Series (see my first post here) I went through how to use List Comprehensions, in Python, to replace loops that generate a list of items. In this post, we will focus on two other types of comprehensions that are very similar. These are the Dictionary Comprehensions and Set Comprehensions.

Continue reading “Other Comprehensions”

Objectives Of This Post

This post is the first in what I intend to be a series of posts on programming in Python. I put together a fair bit of Python code for my job in my role as an analyst. But most of that code is merely gluing together snippets from the internet, as my main focus isn’t writing software but merely accomplishing a task. In this series, I hope to explain concepts with the idea that teaching the material will help me learn it better.

Continue reading “List Comprehensions”

This function is another I wrote to for my predictive modeling class. It will format a binary confusion matrix nicely.

This is a simple function I wrote to nicely format various statistics for the numerical columns in a pandas dataframe, for my predictive modeling class. I thought I would post it here in case it is of use to anyone else, and mostly so I can find it again when I lose it.