This course begins with the one-week intensive seminar "BAN436 Introduction to Python". There, you learned how to use Python to perform simple data analytics that you now would like to share with the world. While BAN436 focused on how to use Python for data handling and analysis, BAN438 focuses on how to make our data analytics available to users through applications. Please note that BAN436 constitutes the first part of BAN438, and it is an absolute prerequisite for continuing with this course.
In BAN438, we will dig deeper into some of the topics covered in BAN436, such as functions and control structures, and we will convert our Python scripts into interactive applications that we can deploy online as web applications.
An application is simply a computer program that executes a specific task that has nothing to do with the operation of the computer itself. The task could be to e.g. execute a calculation, translate a word, or forecast the weather for a given location. A web application is a program that is hosted by a web server, as opposed to being locally installed on a specific computer, and that is accessed through the web browser.
In BAN438, you will learn how to develop simple web applications known as dashboards that executes the three steps in data analytics:
- Data engineering - access the raw data that we wish to analyze. The data can be e.g. supplied by a user, scraped from the web, or retrieved from an API.
- Data analysis - transform and analyze the data. The data can be analyzed through e.g. visualization or by creating prediction models.
- Deployment - return the result to users through the web browser. The result can be returned as e.g. a calculation, model prediction or graph.
After successful completion of this course, you will be able to develop small-scale applications in Python and deploy them online through cloud platforms, as well as gain insight into how large web applications are developed and deployed by businesses.