Early-bird thread

[elz]

Welcome, everybody! On request, we're going to start with Lecture 1 next Monday, 11/9. However, there's quite a bit of reading associated with the first three lectures - here's what it says at the site:

Lectures 1-3

• Introduction: Chapter 1 of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist


• Variables and statements: Chapter 2 of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist


• Strings: Variables and strings section of Python Programming (also, the
  strings section)


• Python variables are names: Other languages have "variables", from Code Like A Pythonista: Idiomatic Python


• For PS0: Input/output section of Python Programming


• Conditionals: Chapter 4 of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (through section 4.8), and the conditional statements section of Python Programming


• Iteration: Loops section of Python Programming


• Tuples: Tuples section from Dive Into Python and the tuples and sequences section of the Python Tutorial


• More on traversing and slicing strings: Chapter 7 of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist

You may want to wait until you've got more context, but if you want to start in on any reading or material this week, here's a place to talk about it!

Comments

[zulu]

Doing well so far. I did the exercises on one of the reading chapters and found that helpful (lots of debugging included). Python Programming/Strings is just a bunch of gobbledegook until I know why those functions are going to be important. Still many open tabs to get through!

[zulu]

Hm, really getting further lost in the Code Like A Pythonista page. Not too worried about this, but hoping it will make more sense on a later read after I've tried to do more things.

[elz]

Yeah, I think it's just the little section on variables that's important to start with (the difference between the variable containing the value and the variable name being attached to the value).

[zulu]

Aha! Yes, as soon as I went back and read only that small bit of the page, it made a lot more sense.