In this course, students will learn elementary programming concepts with the Python (3) language, with an additional section studying Java and the relation between the two languages. Learning Python will allow students to develop the basic skills for functional and object-oriented programming and the fundamentals of polymorphism and imperative programming, as well as a short study on regular expressions. Students can use this knowledge to take on learning other higher-level languages such as C++, Swift, and C# (as well as scripting and scientific languages such as Octave, R, Julia, and Ruby) in an accelerated manner. The class will focus on building programming skills from fundamental keywords to high-level abstraction, in hopes that the student will then continue on to learn a high-level programming language afterward.
Students will learn the following aspects of programming using the Python language:
Section 1:
-Introduction, how to succeed in the course, setup
-What is Python, understanding programming
-Hello World and '__main__'
-Input and Output, Commenting and Docstrings
-Data Types, Arithmetic and Assignment Operators, Numerical Operations
-Strings and String Operations, ASCII
-String Formatting
-Type Conversion, In-Place and Walrus Operators
Section 2:
-PEP and The Zen of Python
-BooleanExpressions and ConditionalStatements
-Chained andNested Conditions
-Logic Operators
-Loops: for, while, 'range', 'in'
-Functions
-Recursion
-The Standard Library and pip
Section 3:
-Lists and List Functions
-List Slices and Matrices
-Dictionaries and DictionaryFunctions
-Tuples and Tuple Unpacking
-The 'itertools' Library
-Sets and Set Functions
Section 4:
-Random Numbers, Math and Data Science Functions
-Exceptions andRaising Exceptions
-Exception Handling, 'finally'
-Assertions
-File I/O
-List Comprehensions and TernaryOperator
Section 5 -Regular Expressions:
-Character Matching
-Data Extraction, Combining Searching andExtracting
-The Escape Character and grep
Section 6 - Objected-Oriented Programming:
-Classes
-Properties and Modules
-DataHiding and Dunder/Magic Methods
-Inheritance
-Class Methods and StaticMethods
-Making a basic GUI with Tkinter
Section 7 - FunctionalProgramming:
-Intro to Functional Programming, First-Class Functions
-Anonymous Functions and Lambda Expressions
-Iterators, Generators, and Decorators
-Higher-Order Functions, 'map' and 'filter'
-Using 'reduce'
-Advanced Function Arguments ('*args', '**kwargs')
Section 8 - Capstone:
-Final exam
-Capstone project
Optional textbooks:
-"Practical Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science Using Python 3" by PaulGries, Jennifer Campbell, and Jason Montojo (Various prices by format and rental, very cheap on Amazon)
-"Python for Everybody: Exploring Data in Python 3" by Charles Severance (Various prices by format and rental, very cheap on Amazon)
-"Python Crash Course, 2nd Edition: A Hands-On, Project-Based Introduction to Programming, 2ndEdition" by EricMatthes (Various prices by format)
