Mark J. Johnson - A Concise Introduction to Programming in Python

A Concise Introduction to Programming in Python

Mark J. Johnson

CRC Press

Taylor & Francis Group

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2015 by Taylor & Francis Group

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Welcome!

This text provides an introduction to writing software in Python. No previous programming experience is necessary.

Most chapters begin with an example program illustrating a small set of new concepts. These programs are available for download at http://www.central.edu/go/conciseintro/. However, you might consider typing each program in by hand rather than using the downloaded files. The reason is that you can learn by typing, both in terms of thoroughly reading the programs, and responding to error messages that result from typos. Rather than being a hindrance, learning to deal with error messages will be quite helpful as you write your own programs.

This text is designed for a first course in computer science and is suitable for majors and non-majors. Among its features:

• Chapters are short, intended for one or at most two class periods. This provides a flexible framework to build a course around.
• Explanations are brief and precise.
• Basic procedural constructs such as functions, selection, and repetition are introduced early, allowing them to be used throughout the semester.
• Objects are (explicitly) used in the middle of the course, and writing classes comes toward the end.
• Examples, exercises, and projects are from a wide range of application domains, including biology, physics, images, sound, mathematics, games, and textual analysis.
• No external libraries are required. All example programs run in standard Python 3.

This text is designed to help teach programming rather than being an encyclopedic reference. Topics are introduced as needed for the examples, and the focus is always on what a beginning student might need to know at that point.

The first few exercises in each chapter are intended to reinforce comprehension, but beyond that, all of the other exercises ask students to write code. Some chapters may seem more like interludes than full chapters, with no example program and relatively few exercises. This variation is intentional: it allows time for students to work on exercises or projects from earlier chapters, while still moving forward with some new material.

are grouped as follows: