Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python)

These are the course-wide materials as well as the first part of Chapter One where we explore what it means to write programs. We finished Chapter One and had the quiz and first assignment in the third week of the class. Throughout the course, you may want to come back and look at these materials. This section should not take you an entire week.

In this module you will set things up so you can write Python programs. Not all activities in this module are required for this class so please read the "Using Python in this Class" material for details.

In the first chapter, we try to cover the "big picture" of programming so you get a "table of contents" of the rest of the book. Don't worry if not everything makes perfect sense the first time you hear it. This chapter is quite broad and you would benefit from reading the chapter in the book in addition to watching the lectures to help it all sink in. You might want to come back and re-watch these lectures after you have finished a few more chapters.

In this chapter we cover how a program uses the computer's memory to store, retrieve and calculate information.

In this section we move from sequential code that simply runs one line of code after another to conditional code where some steps are skipped. It is a very simple concept - but it is how computer software makes "choices".

This is a relatively short chapter. We will learn about what functions are and how we can use them. The programs in the first chapters of the book are not large enough to require us to develop functions, but as the book moves into more and more complex programs, functions will be an essential way for us to make sense of our code.

Loops and iteration complete our four basic programming patterns. Loops are the way we tell Python to do something over and over. Loops are the way we build programs that stay with a problem until the problem is solved.