This course is designed to teach you the foundations in order to write simple programs in Python using the most common structures. No previous exposure to programming is needed. By the end of this course, you'll understand the benefits of programming in IT roles; be able to write simple programs using Python; figure out how the building blocks of programming fit together; and combine all of this knowledge to solve a complex programming problem. We'll start off by diving into the basics of writing a computer program. Along the way, you’ll get hands-on experience with programming concepts through interactive exercises and real-world examples. You’ll quickly start to see how computers can perform a multitude of tasks — you just have to write code that tells them what to do.

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to manipulate files and processes on your computer’s operating system. You’ll also have learned about regular expressions -- a very powerful tool for processing text files -- and you’ll get practice using the Linux command line on a virtual machine. And, this might feel like a stretch right now, but you’ll also write a program that processes a bunch of errors in an actual log file and then generates a summary file. That’s a super useful skill for IT Specialists to know. We’ll kick off by exploring how to execute Python locally, and organize and use code across different Python files. We'll then learn how to read and write different types of files, and use subprocesses and input streams. We'll also dive into Bash scripting and regular expressions -- both very powerful tools for anyone working with systems. We'll even touch on automatic testing, which allow us to automate how we check if our code is correct. To finish, we’ll put all this together by using the tools that we’ve acquired to process data and generate automatic reports. We’ll also explain how to set up your own developer environment in your machine. This is a key step in being able to write and deploy powerful automation tools.

In this course, you’ll learn how to keep track of the different versions of your code and configuration files using a popular version control system (VCS) called Git. We'll also go through how to setup an account with a service called GitHub so that you can create your very own remote repositories to store your code and configuration. Throughout this course, you'll learn about Git's core functionality so you can understand how and why it’s used in organizations. We’ll look into both basic and more advanced features, like branches and merging. We'll demonstrate how having a working knowledge of a VCS like Git can be a lifesaver in emergency situations or when debugging. And then we'll explore how to use a VCS to work with others through remote repositories, like the ones provided by GitHub. By the end of this course, you'll be able to store your code's history in Git and collaborate with others in GitHub, where you’ll also start creating your own portfolio! In order to follow along and complete the assessments, you’ll need a computer where you can install Git or ask your administrator to install it for you.

In this course, we'll give you the tools to quickly identify and solve real-world problems that you might come across in your IT role. We'll look at a bunch of different strategies and approaches for tackling the most common pitfalls of your code and IT infrastructure. You'll learn strategies for approaching almost any technical problem and then see how those apply to solving different real-world scenarios. We picked examples that include general system issues, issues with software that someone else wrote, and issues with programs that we wrote. We'll talk about problems that can affect any operating system, and we'll also look at challenges specific to certain platforms and scripting languages. We strongly recommend that you’ve taken the prior courses in this program, or already have knowledge of Python and Linux so that you can follow along with our troubleshooting examples.