PrintLessons 3 and 4 contain practice exercises that are longer than the previous practice exercises and are designed to prepare you specifically for the projects. You should make your best attempt at each practice exercise before looking at the solution. If you get stuck, study the solution until you understand it.
Don't spend so much time on the practice exercises that you neglect Project 3. However, successfully completing the practice exercises will make Project 3 much easier and quicker for you.
Data for Lesson 3 practice exercises
The data for the Lesson 3 practice exercises is very simple and, like some of the Project 2 practice exercise data, was derived from Washington State Department of Transportation datasets. Download the data here.
Using the discussion forums
Using the discussion forums is a great way to work towards figuring out the practice exercises. You are welcome to post blocks of code on the forums relating to these exercises.
When completing the actual Project 3, avoid posting blocks of code longer than a few lines. If you have a question about your Project 3 code, please email the instructor, or you can post general questions to the forums that don't contain more than a few lines of code.
Getting ready
If the practice exercises look daunting to you, you might start by practicing with your cursors a little bit using the sample data:
- Try to loop through the CityBoundaries and print the name of each city.
- Try using an SQL expression with a search cursor to print the OBJECTIDs of all the park and rides in Chelan county (notice there is a County field that you could put in your SQL expression).
- Use an update cursor to find the park and ride with OBJECTID 336. Assign it a ZIP code of 98512.
You can post thoughts on the above challenges on the forums.