CS 1210
Computer science is a science of abstraction—creating the right model for a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it.
–Alfred 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. 2023–2025. An Introduction to Programming and Computer Science with Python. ISBN: 979-8-9887092-0-6. Hard copy available in UVM 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’ll be writing programs in Python, you’ll need… Python!
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
02: Programming and the Python Shell
03: Types and literals
04: Variables, statements, and expressions
05: Functions
06: Style
07: Console I/O
08: Branching and Boolean expressions
09: Structure, development, and testing
10: Sequences
11: Loops and iteration
- Introduction
- Loops: an introduction
- Loops (video 48:43)
while
loops- An ancient algorithm with a
while
loop for
loops- Iterables
- Iterating over strings
- Calculating a sum in a loop
- Summations and loops (video 10:23)
enumerate()
- Tracing a loop
- Nested loops
- Stacks and queues
- A deeper dive into iteration in Python
- Slicing and sequences (video 10:03)
12: Randomness, games, and simulations
13: File I/O
14: Data analysis and presentation
15: Exception handling
16: Dictionaries
17: Graphs
Appendices
Supplemental material not in ITPACS
- The
global
keyword - Free variables (forthcoming)