- Title: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming
- Department: Computer Science and Engineering
- Author: //
- University: MIT
- Type: WebLink
- Abstract:
# Introduction
# Operators and operands; statements; branching, conditionals, and iteration
# Common code patterns: iterative programs
# Decomposition and abstraction through functions; introduction to recursion
# Floating point numbers, successive refinement, finding roots
# Bisection methods, Newton/Raphson, introduction to lists
# Lists and mutability, dictionaries, pseudocode, introduction to efficiency
# Complexity; log, linear, quadratic, exponential algorithms
# Binary search, bubble and selection sorts
# Divide and conquer methods, merge sort, exceptions
# Testing and debugging
# More about debugging, knapsack problem, introduction to dynamic programming
# Dynamic programming: overlapping subproblems, optimal substructure
# Analysis of knapsack problem, introduction to object-oriented programming
# Abstract data types, classes and methods
# Encapsulation, inheritance, shadowing
# Computational models: random walk simulation
# Presenting simulation results, Pylab, plotting
# Biased random walks, distributions
# Monte Carlo simulations, estimating pi
# Validating simulation results, curve fitting, linear regression
# Normal, uniform, and exponential distributions; misuse of statistics
# Stock market simulation
# Course overview; what do computer scientists do?