CS 1210

Computer science is a science of abstraction鈥攃reating the right model for a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it.

鈥揂lfred V. Aho

Introduction to Programming

Presented here is a subset of materials for use in CS 1210 Introduction to Programming. What follows is incomplete, and subject to revision, deletion, and rearrangement.

Textbook: Cafiero, Clayton. 2023鈥�2025. An Introduction to Programming and Computer Science with Python. ISBN: 979-8-9887092-0-6. Hard copy available in 抖阴探探 Bookstore (price should be $14.00). Revision history (from first print edition forward)

Feedback, including reports of errata, criticisms, suggestions, and proposed revisions, is warmly encouraged.

Preliminaries

Since we鈥檒l be writing programs in Python, you鈥檒l need鈥� Python!

• Installing Python
• Syntax highlighting

Selections from the textbook

Here are selections from the textbook, An Introduction To Programming and Computer Science With Python, and some supplemental videos.

01: Introduction

• Introduction
• Documentation

02: Programming and the Python Shell

• Introduction
• Why learn a programming language?
• The Python shell
• Hello, Python!
• Syntax and semantics
• Introduction to binary numbers

03: Types and literals

• Introduction
• What are types?
• Dynamic typing
• Types and memory
• More on string literals
• Representation error of numeric types

04: Variables, statements, and expressions

• Introduction
• Variables and assignment
• Expressions
• Euclidean or 鈥渇loor鈥� division
• Exponentiation
• Exceptions

05: Functions

• Introduction
• Introduction to functions
• A deeper dive into functions
• Passing arguments to a function
• Scope
• Pure and impure functions
• The math module
• Exceptions

06: Style

• Introduction
• The importance of style
• Constants
• Comments in code

07: Console I/O

• Introduction
• Motivation
• Some ways to format output
• Example: currency converter
• Format specifiers: a quick reference
• Exceptions

08: Branching and Boolean expressions

• Introduction
• Boolean logic and Boolean expressions
• Comparison operators
• Branching
• Truthy and falsey
• Input validation
• Some string methods
• Decision trees
• Logic gates later, for second edition

09: Structure, development, and testing

• Introduction
• main the Python way
• Program structure
• Iterative and incremental development
• Testing your code
• The origin of the term 鈥渂ug鈥�
• Using assertions to test your code
• Rubberducking
• Exceptions

10: Sequences

• Introduction
• Lists
• Tuples
• Mutability and immutability
• Subscripts are indices
• Concatenating lists and tuples
• Copying lists
• Finding an element within a sequence
• Sequence unpacking
• Strings are sequences
• Sequences: a quick reference guide
• Slicing
• Exceptions

11: Loops and iteration

• Introduction
• Loops: an introduction
• while loops
• An ancient algorithm with a while loop
• for loops
• Iterables
• Iterating over strings
• Calculating a sum in a loop
• enumerate()
• Tracing a loop
• Nested loops
• Stacks and queues
• A deeper dive into iteration in Python

12: Randomness, games, and simulations

• Introduction
• The random module
• Pseudo-randomness in more detail

13: File I/O

• Introduction
• Context managers
• Reading from a file
• Writing to a file
• Keyword arguments
• More on printing strings
• The csv module
• Exceptions

14: Data analysis and presentation

• Introduction
• Some elementary statistics
• A brief introduction to plotting with Matplotlib
• The basics of Matplotlib
• Exceptions

15: Exception handling

• Introduction
• Exceptions
• Handling exceptions
• Exceptions and flow of control

16: Dictionaries

• Introduction
• Introduction to dictionaries
• Iterating over dictionaries
• Deleting dictionary keys
• Hashables
• Counting letters in a string
• Exceptions

17: Graphs

• Introduction
• Introduction to graphs

Appendices

• Appendix A: Glossary
• Appendix B: Mathematical notation
• Appendix C: pip and venv
• Appendix D: File systems
• Appendix E: Flow charts

Supplemental material not in ITPACS

• The global keyword
• Free variables (forthcoming)