Introduction to Computer Science and Programming

MP4 | Pdf | Video: 480x360 | 79 kbps | 44 KHz | 2.53 GB

Genre: eLearning | Language: English

This subject is aimed at students with little or no programming experience. It aims to provide students with an understanding of the role computation can play in solving problems. It also aims to help students, regardless of their major, to feel justifiably confident of their ability to write small programs that allow them to accomplish useful goals. The class will use the Python™ programming language.

Course Features

1 Goals of the course; what is computation; introduction to data types, operators, and variables

2 Operators and operands; statements; branching, conditionals, and iteration

3 Common code patterns: iterative programs

4 Decomposition and abstraction through functions; introduction to recursion

5 Floating point numbers, successive refinement, finding roots

6 Bisection methods, Newton/Raphson, introduction to lists

7 Lists and mutability, dictionaries, pseudocode, introduction to efficiency

8 Complexity; log, linear, quadratic, exponential algorithms

9 Binary search, bubble and selection sorts

10 Divide and conquer methods, merge sort, exceptions

11 Testing and debugging

12 More about debugging, knapsack problem, introduction to dynamic programming

13 Dynamic programming: overlapping subproblems, optimal substructure

14 Analysis of knapsack problem, introduction to object-oriented programming

15 Abstract data types, classes and methods

16 Encapsulation, inheritance, shadowing

17 Computational models: random walk simulation

18 Presenting simulation results, Pylab, plotting

19 Biased random walks, distributions

20 Monte Carlo simulations, estimating pi

21 Validating simulation results, curve fitting, linear regression

22 Normal, uniform, and exponential distributions; misuse of statistics

23 Stock market simulation

24 Course overview; what do computer scientists do?