Explorations in Computing: An Introduction to Computer Science and Python Programming

An Active Learning Approach to Teaching the Main Ideas in Computing
Explorations in Computing: An Introduction to Computer Science and Python Programming teaches computer science students how to use programming skills to explore fundamental concepts and computational approaches to solving problems. Designed for CS0 and CS1 courses, the book gives beginning students an introduction to computer science concepts and computer programming.

Prepares Students for Advanced Work in Computer Science
A revised and updated version of the author’s Explorations in Computing: An Introduction to Computer Science, this text incorporates two major differences. It now uses Python, instead of Ruby, as the lab software so that students can seamlessly transition from introductory projects to more advanced studies in later courses. The book also introduces Python programming, providing students with sufficient programming skills so they can implement their own programs.

Practical, Step-by-Step Projects
The interactive lab projects in each chapter allow students to examine important ideas in computer science, particularly how algorithms offer computational solutions to problems. Students can type expressions, view results, and run experiments that help them understand the concepts in a hands-on way.

Web Resources
The Python software modules for each lab project are available on the author’s website. The modules include data files and sample Python code that students can copy and modify. In addition, the site provides a lab manual of installation instructions and tips for editing programs and running commands in a terminal emulator.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – Introduction
Chapter 2 – The Python Workbench: Introducing Python and an environment for interactive experiments
Chapter 3 – The Sieve of Eratosthenes: An algorithm for finding prime numbers
Chapter 4 – A Journey of a Thousand Miles: Iteration as a strategy for solving computational problems
Chapter 5 – Divide and Conquer: A new strategy: Breaking large problems into smaller subproblems
Chapter 6 – Spam, Spam, Spam, Mail, and Spam: A machine learning approach to filtering junk mail
Chapter 7 – Now for Something Completely Different: An algorithm for generating random numbers
Chapter 8 – Bit by Bit: Binary codes and algorithms for text compression and error detection
Chapter 9 – The War of the Words: Computer architecture and machine level programming
Chapter 10 – I’d Like to Have an Argument, Please: A program that understands English (or does it?)
Chapter 11 – The Music of the Spheres: Computer simulation and the N-body problem
Chapter 12 – The Traveling Salesman: A genetic algorithm for a computationally demanding problem