Programming Fundamentals Key Course Resources

Numerous resources are offered with this course that will help you complete it successfully.
The most basic resource is the Sitemap, which you should visit now if you have not already. There, you will learn what to expect with regard to course structure, interactivity, and assessment. In addition to the sitemap, you can use the search bar at the top of the page as you progress through the course.

Throughout this course, you will have the opportunity to review key terms which are defined in the course glossary. If you do not see the definition for a term on the immediate page you can always visit the glossary link listed below. The glossary can be reached at the following link Structured Programming - Glossary or from the home page . Each of the modules is represented by a link in the left hand navigation.

For this course I recommend the following text

Solving a programming problem requires choosing the right concepts. All but the smallest toy problems require di.erent sets of concepts for di.erent parts of the program. A programming paradigm, or programming model, is an approach to programming a computer based on a mathematical theory or a coherent set of principles. It is a way of conceptualizing what it means to perform computation and how tasks to be carried out on the computer should be structured and organized. Programming languages realize programming paradigms. There are many fewer programming paradigms that programming languages. Examples of programming paradigms: imperative, funcional, logical, object-oriented. Most popular languages are imperative and use structured programming techniques. Structured programming techniques involve giving the code you write structures, these often involve writing code in blocks such as sequence (code executed line by line), selection (branching statements such as if..then..else, or case) and repetition (iterative statements such as for, while, repeat, loop).

For readers familiar with other programming languages, the semantics of a Python identifier is most similar to a reference variable in Java or a pointer variable in C++. Each identifier is implicitly associated with the memory address of the object to which it refers. A Python identifier may be assigned to a special object named None, serving a similar purpose to a null reference in Java or C++. Unlike Java and C++, Python is a dynamically typed language, as there is no advance declaration associating an identifier with a particular data type. An identifier can be associated with any type of object, and it can later be reassigned to another object of the same (or different) type. Although an identifier has no declared type, the object to which it refers has a definite type. In our first example, the characters 98.6 are recognized as a floating-point literal, and thus the identifier temperature is associated with an instance of the float class having that value.
A programmer can establish an alias by assigning a second identifier to an existing object.