Handbook

This is an intermediate (Level 2) Information Systems (IS) elective course that is designed for business students from a variety of discplines. It introduces students to data processing and programming by providing a first step towards learning web programming technologies for data analytics. Course content is presented through three learning modules. These include business data processing – commands and scripts; business data insights – world wide web, and the future of business data – trends and issues.

Following an introduction to Bash and Python scripting languages in Module 1, students learn how data insights are generated in modern business practices using the world wide web, both in the form of publishing and in the form of data-scraping from websites, in Module 2. In Module 3, the course introduces students to emerging technologies such as Machine Learning as well as the Social, Legal, and Ethical issues relevant to the technologies discussed in this course. Throughout the course students are introduced to a number of Python libraries, including CGI (Common Gateway Interface) for serving web pages, BeautifulSoup and Regex for data scraping and data cleansing, as well as SKLearn and Tensorflow for conducting machine learning.

Please note: While this course does not assume prior coding experience beyond INFS1603, students may benefit from having completed MATH1041 or ECON1203, as well as INFS1609 prior to taking this course.