Course abstract

This course is an introduction to programming and problem solving in Python. It does not assume any prior knowledge of programming. Using some motivating examples, the course quickly builds up basic concepts such as conditionals, loops, functions, lists, strings and tuples. It goes on to cover searching and sorting algorithms, dynamic programming and backtracking, as well as topics such as exception handling and using files. As far as data structures are concerned, the course covers Python dictionaries as well as classes and objects for defining user defined datatypes such as linked lists and binary search trees.