Course Overview

The software makes the world go round. Cars and TVs have software that controls how they work, and global commerce and finance are impossible without software that controls the stocks, carry out payments, find the best transport route, etc. Coding (or programming) is the construction of software. Coding involves writing a ‘recipe’, which in computing is called an algorithm, in a so-called programming language that a computer can understand. When the computer runs the code we wrote, it follows the ‘recipe’, step by step. We will use Python, a popular programming language for teaching and for professional software development. You will see that Python code reads almost like plain English. Writing simple programs in Python is not very difficult, once you have come up with the ‘recipe’, the algorithm. This tutorial shows how to code in Python the basic building blocks of all algorithms, and how to ask the user for input and produce some output on the screen. The skills, concepts and jargon (in boldface) you will learn are the foundations for coding all sorts of apps in all sorts of languages, not just Python.

You won’t have to install any software, the code examples are embedded in this course and you can execute and change them right here.

Course learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• use programming language Python to produce code
• understand the sequences of instructions in Python programmes
• understand repetition in Python programming language.