Introduction to Programming and Scientific Applications (Spring 2021)

Course plan

The below course plan contains videos and slides for watching at your own speed.

Code used on slides and used for making the figures on the slides can be found in this folder.

Below [G] refers to the textbook by John V. Guttag, Introduction to Computation and Programming Using Python With Application to Understanding Data, 2nd Edition. 472 pages. MIT Press, 2016. The book is not curriculum in the course.

There will only be live lectures Wednesdays 14:15-16:00 at Zoom covering questions posted on the discussion forum and/or going over some examples/exercises (live coding exercises and solution code).

Week	Date		Topic	Litterature	Slides & Video	Exercises
5	Monday	1/2	Semester starts
	Wednesday	3/2	Introduction to Python	[G] 1	introduction.pdf	lecture 1
	Friday	5/2	Python basics variables, int, float, str, type conversion, assignment, print(), help(), type() Control structures if-elif-else, while-break-continue, input()	[G] 2.1, 2.2, 2.4	basics.pdf control.pdf Basics 55:27 Control 32:09	lecture 2 handin 1
6	Monday	8/2	Exercise classes start
	Wednesday	10/2	Basic operations None, bool, basic operations, strings	[G] 2.3	operations.pdf Operations 1:02:04	lecture 3
	Friday	12/2	Lists Syntax, operations, copy.deepcopy Control structures while-else, for-loops, for-break-continue-else, range	[G] 3.2, 5.2, 5.5	lists.pdf Lists 1:00:04	lecture 4 handin 2
7	Wednesday	17/2	Tuples and lists tuples, lists, mutability, list comprehension, for-if, for-for, list(), any(), all(), enumerate(), zip()	[G] 5.1, 5.3, 5.5	tuple.pdf Tuples 50:13 Orientation test 11:38	lecture 5
	Friday	19/2	Dictionaries and sets dict, set, frozenset, dictionary comprehension, set comprehension, collections, deque, namedtuple, Counter	[G] 5.6	dictionaries.pdf Dictionaries 49:51 Handins 3-4 5:11	lecture 6 handin 3
8	Wednesday	24/2	Functions functions, return, scoping, arguments, keyword arguments, *, **, global variables	[G] 4.1, 4.4	functions.pdf Functions 58:04	lecture 7
	Friday	26/2	Recursion symbol table, stack frames	[G] 4.3	recursion.pdf Recursion 46:29	lecture 8 handin 4
9	Wednesday	3/3	Recursion and iteration algorithm examples	[G] 3.1, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 10.1	recursion_iteration.pdf Recursion and iteration 57:43	lecture 9 handin 5
	Friday	5/3	Functions as objects lambda, higher-order functions, map, filter, reduce	[G] 5.4, 10.2	lambda.pdf Lambda 44:05	lecture 10
10	Wednesday	10/3	Object oriented programming classes, objects, self, construction, encapsulation	[G] 8.1, 8.3.0	classes.pdf Classes 1:11:42	lecture 11
	Friday	12/3	Class hierarchies inheritance, method overriding, super, multiple inheritance	[G] 8.2	hierarchies.pdf Class hierarchies 44:20	lecture 12 handin 6
11	Wednesday	17/3	Exceptions and file input/output try-raise-except-finally, Exception, control flow, file open/read/write, sys.stdin, sys.stdout, sys.stderr, context manager	[G] 7.1, 7.2, 4.6	exceptions.pdf Exceptions 28:51 Files 20:13 Sudoku 15:45	lecture 13
	Friday	19/3	Documentation, testing and debugging docstring, defensive programming, assert, test driven developement, assertions, testing, unittest, doctest, debugger, static type checking, mypy	[G] 4.2, 7.3, 6.1, 6.2	testing.pdf Testing 48:44 Mypy 13:32	lecture 14 handin 7
12	Wednesday	24/3	Decorators @, @property, @functools.total_ordering, dataclasses		decorators.pdf Decorators 54:37	lecture 15
	Friday	26/3	Dynamic programming memoization, decorator memoized, systematic subproblem computation	[G] 13.1, 13.2	dynamic_programming.pdf Dynamic programming 56:46 Coding competitions 10:47	lecture 16 handin 8
13	Saturday-Monday	27/3 -5/4	Easter break - no teaching
14	Tuesday	6/4	No exercise class
	Wednesday	7/4	Visualization and optimization Matplotlib, Jupyter, scipy.optimize.minimize No exercise class	[G] 11	optimization.pdf Matplotlib 1:03:40 Jupyter 26:35 SciPy minimize 29:47	lecture 17
	Friday	9/4	Multi-dimensional data NumPy, matrix multiplication, @, numpy.linalg.solve, numpy.polyfit	[G] 18	numpy.pdf Numpy 42:09 Polyfit 6:12 Numpy matplotlib 15:27	lecture 18
15	Wednesday	14/4	Linear programming scipy.optimize.linprog		linear_programming.pdf pagerank.ipynb max-flow.ipynb Linprog 6:19 Maxflow 10:05 Pagerank 22:17	lecture 19 handin 9
	Friday	16/4	Generators and iterators yield, __iter__, __next__, measuring memory usage	[G] 8.3.1	generator.pdf Iterators 38:26 Generators 30:04 Memory usage 9:27	lecture 20 handin 10
16	Wednesday	21/4	Modules and packages from-import-as, __name__, "__main__", heapq	[G] 4.5	modules.pdf Modules 24:28 Heapq 8:51	lecture 21
	Friday	23/4	Working with text file formats (CSV, Json, XML, Excel), regular expressions (module re), finditer		text.pdf File formats 39:47 Regular expressions 17:59 Lindenmeyer systems 14:10	lecture 22
17	Wednesday	28/4	Relational data SQLite, pandas		pandas.pdf pandas.ipypdf SQLite 29:23 Pandas 34:23	lecture 23
	Friday	30/4	Holiday (General Prayer Day) - no teaching
18	Wednesday	5/5	Clustering k-means, scipy.cluster.vq.kmeans, DBSCAN, neural networks	[G] 23	clustering.pdf Clustering 27:25 DBSCAN 11:11 Neural networks 15:56	lecture 24
	Friday	7/5	Graphical user interfaces (GUI) Tkinter, qt		gui.pdf Tkinter 50:37	lecture 25
19	Wednesday	12/5	Java vs Python		java.pdf Java 1:03:03	lecture 26
	Thursday	13/5	Holiday (Ascension Day) - no teaching
	Friday	14/5	No lecture
20	Wednesday	19/5	Follow up on course evaluation, discussion of exam		ipsa21-course-evaluation.pdf	lecture 27
	Friday	21/5	No lecture Last day of semester
21	Monday	31/5	Project deadline 23:59
	June		Q & A sessions (TAs and Lecturer)
			Exam