Glossary

Here's a glossary of some common Python terms.


Algorithm
A step-by-step procedure or formula for solving a problem. In Python, algorithms are often implemented using functions and control flow statements (e.g., loops and conditionals). Python algorithms provide a detailed set of instructions by which you can process data for a specific purpose.

Anaconda
Anaconda is a distribution of the Python and R programming languages for scientific computing, that aims to simplify package management and deployment. The distribution includes data-science packages suitable for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

The Anaconda distribution can be downloaded for free here: https://www.anaconda.com/download

API
An API, short for “application programming interface,” facilitates communication between two computer systems. Let's consider a mobile weather application that provides users with real-time weather updates.

Argument
A value that is passed to a function when it is called. In Python, arguments can be positional or keyword-based. Fundamentally, parameters are the variables inside a function's parentheses. Arguments provide values for those parameters.

BeautifulSoup
Beautiful Soup is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. It works with your favorite parser to provide idiomatic ways of navigating, searching, and modifying the parse tree. It commonly saves programmers hours or days of work.

Chromedriver
ChromeDriver is a standalone server that implements the W3C WebDriver standard. WebDriver is an open source tool built for automated testing of web apps across many browsers. Its interface allows for control and introspection of user agents locally or remotely using capabilities.

chromedriver_autoinstaller
A library that automatically downloads the version of ChromeDriver compatible with the client's version of Chrome. Supports all versions of Chrome. It can be installed by running in command line:
pip install chromedriver_autoinstaller

Command Prompt

Command Prompt, also known as cmd.exe or cmd, is the default command-line interpreter for the OS/2, eComStation, ArcaOS, Microsoft Windows, and ReactOS operating systems. On Windows CE .NET 4.2, Windows CE 5.0 and Windows Embedded CE 6.0 it is referred to as the Command Processor Shell.

 Commands are the instructions we give to the application to execute certain tasks.

In Unix / MacOS the command prompt is called "Terminal", "Command”, “Prompt” or “Shell”, depending on the OS you are running. In my case I use MacOS and the app is called "Terminal".


Comma Separated Values -CSV- file

Comma-separated values is a text file format that uses commas to separate values, and newlines to separate records. A CSV file stores tabular data in plain text, where each line of the file typically represents one data record.

CSV files are great for Excel, easy to import and relatively small in size, depending on the number of rows. 


Distribution
A Python distribution is an archive file that contains one or more Python package. The distribution file is what the end-user will download and install. It's typically just one package. There are two common types of distributions: Source distributions and the wheel binary format.

Debugging
The process of identifying and removing errors from a program. This can involve using tools like print statements, logging, or interactive debuggers.

Elements
An HTML element is a type of HTML document component, one of several types of HTML nodes. The first used version of HTML was written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1993 and there have since been many versions of HTML.

Exception

An exception is an unexpected behavior (wrong or not) that occurs during software execution. This can interrupt the normal flow of execution and needs proper handling. These “unexpected behaviors” may be in methods of your own software or third-party libraries/components. 

Exceptions can be caught and handled using try-except blocks.


Indentation

In the written form of many languages, indentation describes empty space, a.k.a. white space, used around text to signify an important aspect of the text such as: Beginning of a paragraph Hierarchy – subordinate concept Quotation Many computer languages use block indentation to demarcate blocks of source code. (Press TAB to indentate).

 It determines the structure of the code, especially for defining blocks such as loops, conditionals, and functions. Here's a simple example to illustrate Python indentation:


JupyterLab
JupyterLab is a web-based interactive development environment for notebooks, code, and data. Its flexible interface allows users to configure and arrange workflows in data science, scientific computing, computational journalism, and machine learning. A modular design invites extensions to expand and enrich functionality.

Library

Collections of pre-written or precompiled code and functions that extend the capabilities of the Python programming language. They provide a wide range of tools and modules for various tasks, making it easier for developers to work on specific tasks without reinventing the wheel.

Python's standard library includes modules for a wide range of tasks, and additional libraries can be installed via package managers like pip.  


Module

A module is a file containing Python definitions and statements. The file name is the module name with the suffix .py appended. 

Modules can be imported and used in other Python scripts.


os (python module)

The OS module in Python provides functions for interacting with the operating system. OS comes under Python's standard utility modules. This module provides a portable way of using operating system-dependent functionality. The *os* and *os. path* modules include many functions to interact with the file system.


Package

Container for storing multiple Python modules. We can install packages in Python using the pip package manager.


Pandas

Pandas is an open source Python package that is most widely used for data science/data analysis and machine learning tasks. In the scraper project, it is used to save the scraped data into a csv file.


Parsing

It means to resolve (a sentence) into its component parts and describe their syntactic roles or simply it is an act of parsing a string or a text.


PIP

The standard package manager for Python. It allows you to install and manage packages that aren't part of the Python standard library.


Python

Python is an open-source programming language, having features like object-oriented, interpreted and high-level too. It is a dynamically typed programming language, which is easy to use with redable and user-friendly syntax. It has huge libraries, frameworks and large community support.

More documentation: https://www.python.org/doc/essays/blurb/ 


PyCharm

PyCharm is an integrated development environment used for programming in Python. It provides code analysis, a graphical debugger, an integrated unit tester, integration with version control systems, and supports web development with Django. PyCharm is developed by the Czech company JetBrains.


Selenium

Selenium with Python is used to carry out automated test cases for browsers or web applications. You can easily use it to simulate tests such as tapping on a button, entering content to the structures, skimming the entire site, etc.


WebDriver

Selenium WebDriver is a web framework that permits you to execute cross-browser tests. This tool is used for automating web-based application testing to verify that it performs expectedly. Selenium WebDriver allows you to choose a programming language to create test scripts.


URL

A uniform resource locator, colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier, although many people use the two terms interchangeably.


Visual Studio

Visual Studio is an integrated development environment developed by Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps.


Web Scraping

Process of using bots to extract content and data from a website. Unlike screen scraping, which only copies pixels displayed onscreen, web scraping extracts underlying HTML code and, with it, data stored in a database.


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