Welcome to CS21. This course is designed to have a mix of lecture and hands on in class lab exercises. This page will review some of the tools we will use during the labs and help you get set up with the system in the CS department.

This course is designed for students with little or no programming experience. If you have taken a computer science course previously or taught yourself basic programming skill in any language, even if it wasn’t python, you may find this course too slow. Students with prior programming experience are encouraged to contact Prof. Andrew Danner to take the CS Placement exam to see if CS21 is the proper fit.

The CS machines in the Sci 256, Sci 240, the overflow lab (Sci 238) and Clothier Lab are on a separate network than the machines managed by ITS. You need a separate account with a separate password to access these machines. If you do not have an account, please see Jeff Knerr to get a user agreement form.

The first time you login, you will likely want to change your randomly assigned password. Open a terminal window by clicking the terminal icon on the bottom toolbar. At the $ prompt, type passwd, press enter and follow the instructions. Note that when you are typing your old or new password, nothing will be displayed to the screen (no `*’s and certainly not your password). The program will not allow you to pick a password that it thinks is too short or too easy to guess. If you ever forget your password, you can reset it by going to CS password reset page.

Your student ID has an RFID tag that can allow you access to the building and the labs after hours. This year, you should have automatically have access to the lab space by enrolling in the course. If you are having trouble with the card readers, please let me know.

If you are looking to add this course or switch to a different section, please talk to Lauri Courtenay before you leave class today. Lauri manages the waitlist for all sections. We will try to provide you an answer to your registration related questions as soon as possible. If you are already on the waitlist, please sign in on form provided in class.

The Course Website is updated regularly and contains recent course announcements, links to inclass exercises, lab assignments, quiz topics, and other less dynamic course information including office hours, ninja sessions, and python tips. Bookmark the website in firefox or chrome and refer to it regularly. All sections have the same quiz dates and lab assignments.

This semester, we are using Piazza to manage course discussions and announcements. If you are registered for the course, you should get an email soon about registering for Piazza. You are encouraged to ask questions on the Piazza forums instead of sending us emails directly. Please review the Piazza guidelines on how to write a good Piazza post.

This course has a mandatory lab section. Attendance is required unless you have completed and submitted the lab for the week prior to the start of lab. Labs started Tuesday and Lab 00 is due Saturday night.

Computer science focuses on two primary questions; what can be computed, and how efficiently can computers solve problems? The answers are more nuanced than "everything", and "really fast". At the core of the discipline is algorithms. Algorithms are concise descriptions of how to solve a problem computationally. Algorithms can be implemented in a programming language and interpreted by computer hardware to automate computation. Programming is NOT the core of computer science. Programming is a way to automate and test the creative thought process that resulted in an algorithm. Programming is one tool at the disposal of computer scientists, but it is not the only tool. This course will teach you how to discover, develop, and write clear computational solutions to, often times non-computationally themed, problems. To check your thinking, you will also learn programming, debugging, and testing skills.

Python is the programming language we will use to implement and test our algorithms. It is relatively easy to learn, even for people not in computer science or related fields. It is free to download and it runs on many platforms including linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. It’s pretty fun to learn and we can get started right away!

Eventually, we will be saving our python code in files. You will also be using two commands regularly through the course to get and submit files for the course: update21 and handin21. Try to run them now at the linux prompt. You should run update21 before starting each lab assignment and handin21 to turn in lab assignments. You can run them as often as you like. update21 will not clobber files you modify after running update21 and handin21 can submit the same lab multiple times. Each handin submission is stored separately, but only most recent copy submitted prior to the deadline will be graded. You may continue to submit after the deadline, but these submissions will be ignored.

If update21 or handin21 does not work for you or it says you are not allowed to run these programs, email me. It is usually my fault, not yours. I may need to add you to the class roster, change handin or change permissions on a directory.

If update21 worked for you, it should have created an empty welcome.py file in your ~/cs21/inclass/w01-intro directory. Let’s practice some basic linux commands to:

Inside the atom editor, click on the welcome.py to open it for editing. Type in the following content as your first python program. Use your name instead of A. Danner to take credit for your work.

Save the file by pressing CTRL-S, and run the program by typing python3 welcome.py in the terminal. Did it work? If not, what errors did you observe?

At the end of class on Monday, we wrote our first full python program using the atom editor. You can use any editor you want to modify the file, but to simplify the course discussion, we will be using atom throughout the course. Let’s look at a few of the components of our first program and explore python syntax and semantics. A programming language’s syntax describes the rules for valid placement of symbols and overall program structure. Semantics describes the meaning of the overall program as it relates to the syntax.

At the top of our program, we see a comment in triple block quotes

Next we see the definition of our main function. For the first few weeks of the semester, our programs will always have this def main(): syntax. Later in the semester, around week 4, we will write other functions of our own besides main. A function is a reusable piece of code that can potentially accept some input data and produce some output. For now, we simply place what we want our program to do inside the body of the main function by indenting. So far, we only have a single print (print() is a built-in function), but we will soon add more.

The function definition is merely that: a definition. It does not actually run the code inside immediately. To see the output, we need to call the function by specifying the function’s name (without the def or the trailing :) and including any required input in between the parentheses. main does not require any input, so a simple main() as our last line will suffice. Note that this line is not indented or inside the function definition.

We use computer programs to process data, but a program must have a way of storing information and referring to it later. Our primary way of doing this is through the use of variables. A variable is a named container that stores a value of a particular type. In the example below, place is a variable that stores the name of a place. The data type currently stored in place is a string containing a sequence of characters between quotes.

The syntax

assigns the variable name on the left hand side the value of the expression on the right hand side. It is illegal, or a syntax error to have a constant value on the left and a variable name on the right.

In addition to the string type (str) , we will initially focus on the integer (int) data type for whole numbers, e.g.,

and the floating point (float) data type for decimal data, e.g,

I encourage you to read Chapter 2 of the online text book for a longer discussion on topics regarding

Another good way to experiment is just to open a python shell and try a few one liners.

Sometimes you may find it helpful or necessary to change a value of one type to another type. For example the value "7" is a string because it enclosed in quotes. But the contents of the string, the character 7 is also a valid integer. You can convert a value to an integer using the int() built in function. Try these examples in the python shell.

Similarly, you can use float() to convert a value to a float, or str() to convert a value to a string.

One of the most helpful built in functions in the first few weeks of the course will be the input() function. When provided a string prompt as input argument, this function prints the prompt to the screen and waits for a user to type something. When the user presses the Enter key, their response is returned as a value by the input() function as a string. A sample usage might be

The program above is pretty terse. Can you modify it so it prints "Hello" followed by the entered name on the same line?

Suppose we are given the following problem: Have the user enter the current year as a number and the year he or she plans to graduate and print how many more college years he/she has left. We want to design an algorithm that can solve this problem (this one is a bit easy) and then implement and test our solution in python.

Here are some steps a computer scientist might use to solve the problem:

The real innovation is in steps 1 and 2. Steps 3 and 4 are sometimes skipped, argued logically/mathematically, or handed off to new hires, grad students, or little brothers. Always do step 4 if you do step 3.

You will soon see in Python and other programming languages how to combine simple statements to create complex powerful code. This takes practice and experience. For example, consider the following snippet of code:

The first line calls input to ask the user of your program (i.e., the person who is running the python program you wrote) for a number. This gets returned by the input function as a string and stored in yearText. input always returns a string, even if it is supposed to represent a number. The second line converts the string value contained in yearText, converts it to an int, and saves the value in a variable called year.

It’s possible to combine the code into a single line of python code

Both snippets of code are legal Python. Which is better or preferable is a matter of taste. Our general advice to use the former style until you’re very comfortable with Python syntax. Beginning students tend to over-complicate code, which makes code harder to read and more likely to have errors. Try to keep your code simple.