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!

• Installing Python
• Syntax highlighting
• Getting started with Thonny IDE (video 6:40)

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
• The Python shell (video 7:18)
• 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
• Literals, types, expressions, and operators (video 22:33)
• Representation error of numeric types

04: Variables, statements, and expressions

• Introduction
• Variables and assignment
• Variables and assignment (video 15:46)
• Expressions
• Expressions (video 8:16)
• Euclidean or “floor” division
• Exponentiation
• Exceptions

05: Functions

• Introduction
• Introduction to functions
• A deeper dive into functions
• Passing arguments to a function
• Functions (video 9:21)
• Functions with more than one parameter (video 15:35)
• Scope
• Pure and impure functions
• Pure and impure functions (video 5:00)
• The math module
• Exceptions

06: Style

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

07: Console I/O

• Introduction
• Motivation
• Using the input() function (video 13:51)
• Some ways to format output
• Example: currency converter
• Format specifiers: a quick reference
• Using f-strings and format specifiers (video 19:57)
• Exceptions
• How to read exceptions (video 7:49)

08: Branching and Boolean expressions

• Introduction
• Boolean logic and Boolean expressions
• Booleans (video 6:59)
• Comparison operators
• Branching
• Even or odd (video 7:06)
• Truthy and falsey
• Truthy and falsey (video 5:15)
• 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 “bug”
• 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
• 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

• 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)