How to Program: Computer Science Concepts and Python Exercises

Writing a program that produces a greeting as the first exercise in coding a computer program; why Python is the ideal computer language for beginners and many others; onscreen instructions for installing Python and the programming editor PyCharm.

The basic operations of computers; the memory hierarchy; what the CPU does; considering variables, which are like boxes where units of data are stored in a program; looking at simple arithmetic operations with variables; trying input/output commands.

A conditional statement is usually involved any time a computer takes different paths depending on a response; delving into these tools; looking at branching points, comparisons, if/then statements, nesting conditionals and Boolean expressions.

Writing a program that is useful for saving money; learning the importance of planning ahead, testing often and building code incrementally; Professor Keyser describes instructive incidents from computer history and his own experience.

Getting a computer to perform a sequence of instructions repeatedly until a task is complete; discovering the ease of writing such loop programs; the peril of getting stuck in infinite loops; investigating while loops, for loops and iterations.

Learning the fundamentals of files; the file format that one writes to and reads from is typically one long string of alphanumeric characters; how these differ from binary files such as images, which are composed of 1s and 0s.