Program

The course is organized in lectures and practical sessions, and will cover the following topics:

• computer architecture basics
• information representation (integers, floating points, characters)
• algorithms
• fundamental aspects: structure of a Python program, built-in basic types and arithmetic/logical operators, statements, input/output, basic control structures/statements
• complex data types (lists, dictionaries, sets) and built-in methods
• functions, parameters and scopes
• files

texts

Python manuals

• Mark Lutz, Python Pocket Reference, O'Reilly
• J. Hunt, A Beginners Guide to Python 3 Programming, Springer
• any book you find

exam

The exam can be taken in each one of the scheduled sessions in January-February, July and September.
The exam consists of the oral discussion of a programming project to be developed autonomously on an assigned topic to be turned in a week before the exam date.
The topic of the project will be made available at least 15 days in advance.

The programming project will be evaluated in terms of the quality of the adopted choices with respect to adopted data structures and solving algorithms and the correctness of the proposed solutions. The exam is passed upon obtaining a score equal or greater than 18/30, being the maximum score 30/30.

The programming project will allow students to demonstrate their:

• degree of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental aspects of the course
• the ability to apply the above-mentioned knowledge to solve exercises and realistic problems

practical sessions

The focus of the course is on enabling the design and development of a good solution to solve a given problem, by means of a Python program. The use of the computer to be able to execute the program is encouraged, and students should bring their computer to class for practical sessions.

development environment: linux/unix

• editor: no IDE, a simple text editor, with syntax highlighting featuers (unix/linux: gedit - mac: TextMate, SublimeText, windows: Notepad++, SublimeText)
• execution: python downloads (version 2.7 I will explain differences)

Those who own a mac can use the system as it is, using the terminal. However, the system comes with python 2.7 installed, and you can keep that version, paying attention to (limited) syntax differences.

Those who have a Windows 10 system can follow the instructions to quickly install python 3.7 (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/python/beginners or google for help).

You can also install Jupyter Notebook (https://jupyter.org/): an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text.
It is not the preferred solution though.