Introduction to Computing Using Python: An Application Development Focus

Introduction to Computing Using Python: An Application Development Focus

Perkovic’s Introduction to Programming Using Python is more than just an introduction to programming. It is an inclusive introduction to Computer Science that takes the pedagogical approach of “the right tool for the job at the right moment,” and focuses on application development.

The book’s approach is hands-on and problem-oriented, with practice problems and solutions appearing throughout the text. The text is imperative-first, but does not shy away from discussing objects early where appropriate. Discussions of user-defined classes and Object-Oriented Programming appear later in the text, when students have more background and the concepts can be motivated.

The book includes a chapter on problem solving and classical algorithms, and ways to apply core skills to application development. The last three chapters introduce a broad array of topics through the context of web crawling and search engines, including recursion, regular expressions, depth-first search, Google’s MapReduce framework, GUI widgets, HTML parsers, SQL, and multicore programming.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction to Computer Science
2 Python Data Types
3 Imperative Programming
4 Text Data, Files, and Exceptions
5 Execution Control Structures
6 Containers and Randomness
7 Namespaces
8 Object-Oriented Programming
9 Graphical User Interfaces
10 Recursion
11 The Web and Search
12 Databases and Data Processing