The activities assume that you have forked the COMP0035 tutorials repository, cloned it to your computer, and set up a project with a virtual environment within your IDE (VS Code or PyCharm).
Login to GitHub and navigate to your forked copy of the COMP0035 tutorials repository.
Check whether any changes have been made. For example, the image below shows 1 new commit has been made to the original.
If changes have been made, you will need to update your forked repository.
Click on the "Synch fork" button; and then on "Update branch".
Now, open your IDE (VS Code, PyCharm) and update the local copy of the repository. This assumes you have integrated your IDE with your GitHub account in week 1. You may be prompted to log in to GitHub before you can carry out the following.
- In PyCharm try menu option Git > Pull
- In VS Code click on the source code control icon on the left side panel, then when the source code control pane opens, click on the three dots and select Pull.
There are other methods, look in the Help for either PyCharm or VSCode.
Open a terminal window within your IDE in the project directory.
Check that your virtual environment is activated. There are various ways to do this, IDEs vary, usually a quick visual
way is to check whether the prompt starts with (.venv)
or the name if your venv folder if not .venv
. You can also
use Python in the Terminal:
import os
print(os.environ.get('VIRTUAL_ENV'))
The following screenshot shows this in PyCharm on macOS:
If you are not in a venv, refer to Week 1 activity 7 for instructions.
The activities use a tool called Mermaid to define and display database diagrams. To view the diagrams in the markdown you need to have this tool installed.
For PyCharm, Go to PyCharm | Settings | Plugins then search for the Mermaid plugin.
For VS Code, go to Code | Settings | Extensions and find the Mermaid chart extension.
Use the version of the data files in the data_db_activity
directory for these activities. A change has been made to the '
summer 1984' row in the data for this activity.
Tutorial activities can be found in the activities/week4 folder. These are:
- Introduction to database design and ERD (lecture recap)
- Design and draw an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) for a database normalised to 3rd normal form (3NF)
- Design and draw an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) for a database normalised to 3rd normal form (3NF) - part 2
- Data constraints and UPDATE/DELETE actions
- Further practice/information
As a third year module, the coursework is not meant to be a series of instructions to follow. However, to get you started this week here are some suggestions of what to do:
- Draw an ERD for your data set. Start with a single table then look for any issues that break the rules for normalisation up to the third normal form.
Do some extra research. There are many tutorials publicly available that focus on data preparation and exploration with pandas. Try to find examples that do more that has been covered in this tutorial to expand your knowledge.