CSC 221: Introduction to Programming
Course Overview         Fall 2023

GENERAL KNOWLEDGE problem-solving skills, critical thinking skills, communication skills PYTHON LANGUAGE FEATURES variables: basic data types: numbers, strings, Booleans naming conventions, assignment statements, expressions immutable vs. mutable values, variable scope functions def, parameters, return statement, doc strings built-in functions (print, abs, max, min), importing modules (random, math) conditional execution if statement, Boolean operators (<, <=, >, >=, ==, !=, and or, not) if (1-way), if-else (2-way), cascading if-elif-else (multi-way) repetition for loops, counter/range-driven while loops, condition-driven input/output input function, reading from a file, read vs. readline print function sequences common operations/functions: +, *, len, indexing, slicing traversal: by item, by index strings (sequences of characters, immutable) methods: isalpha, capitalize, upper, strip, find, replace, ... examples: palindrome, rotation, cipher lists (sequences of arbitrary items, mutable) methods: count, index, sort, insert, remove, ... examples: list of words, tweet data, letter counts, hand of cards classes/objects class definition, fields, methods, self special methods: __init__, __str__, __eq__, __lt__, __le__ examples: Turtle, Die, Coin, Card, DeckOfCards, Image PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES conditionals for alternatives e.g., recognize doubles, recognize a vowel, distinguish flush/full house loops for repetition (conditional while loops, range-driven for loops) accumulator pattern for counting/adding/collecting data e.g., roll dice until doubles, count number of vowels, construct acronym input for user input; read/readline for files e.g., interactive card game, reading text from a file & splitting into words lists for storing and accessing arbitrary data e.g., words from a line of text, tweet data, cards in a deck object-oriented design classes model real-world entities; objects are instances of those classes fields maintain state of an object; methods implement behaviors e.g., DeckOfCards field (list of cards), methods (shuffle, dealCard, addCard, numCards, ...) agile development high-level (usually OO) design -> simplified prototype -> augment/revise ASSIGNMENTS: 1. Python statements 2. Python modules (wheels-on-the-bus, baseball stat, relative time) 3. Python functions (rewriting HW2 & FaceOff game simulations) 4. Files & strings (author fingerprint v.1) 5. Files & lists (author fingerprint v.2 w/ letter histogram) 6. Lists & structured data (tweet statistics) 7. Classes & OOP (interactive Skip3 game)