willcl-ark/conditionals-python-readme-data-science-intro-000

This repository is a beginner-friendly lesson that teaches you how to make your Python code make decisions. Instead of your program running every line top to bottom no matter what, you learn how to tell it to do something only when a specific condition is met, like "if the vacation is longer than four days, call it a long vacation." The lesson walks through the if and else keywords in Python, showing how you can control which lines of code actually run. It starts with simple examples: setting a variable and only changing it when a condition is true. From there it covers "truthiness", Python's way of treating values like 1 or a non-empty string as "true" and values like 0, None, or empty lists as "false" without needing an explicit comparison. It finishes by combining conditionals with loops, so you can filter a list and keep only the items that match a rule, such as pulling out every greeting that starts with the letter "h." The audience here is someone just starting to learn Python, maybe a founder tinkering with prototypes, a PM who wants to read code more confidently, or a beginner working through data science fundamentals. The examples are deliberately simple and concrete: vacation days, greetings, short functions. You don't need any prior experience beyond basic variables and loops. The project is built as a Jupyter Notebook, which means the lesson mixes explanatory text with runnable code cells, so you can experiment as you read. There's nothing flashy here, it's a straightforward teaching resource covering one core concept thoroughly.