29.05.2026, Mirjam Müller
Hi!
If you are looking for a thorough, textbook-like python introduction, keep looking. This is not it. Instead, this is a set of practical skills (with as many print commands as possible for visualization), for those that struggle to get started with python and feel overwhelmed by the abstract concepts. It is not perfect and by no means a textbook.
As Bioinformaticians, python can be a very useful tool, especially to parse and process biological files, such as outputs from various softwares or database/sequencing files. But it can also be incredibly overwhelming when freshly starting, as the language is not quite "intuitive".
I structured this into a series of different jupyter notebooks, chosen because you can run code right after the explanation and see what it prints for easy visualization. If you are not familiar jupyter notebook, you can find an explanation on how to open them in VSCode here.
The notebooks are structured to be built on the previous topics, so if you feel lost at any point, the answer should be in a previous notebook.
- 01 Introduction
- 02 Lists, Dictionaries, Sets and Tuples
- 03 Loops and Conditions
- 04 File handling
- 05 Working with biological files
- 06 How to write your own functions
- 07 How to run a script from command line and use input arguments
- 08 Pandas
- 09 Other useful packages
I hope this helps someone and if nothing else, at least makes python seem less intimidating.
Good luck!