Course Overview

"Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute." - Abelson & Sussman

Whether you are interested in advancing your career, learning how to build cool things or just want to learn something new, this course will prepare you to take the first step into the world of computer programming.

You should leave the final lesson able to write simple programs and have the necessary tools to navigate your path into the field. We will cover the fundamental ideas required to understand how computers interpret code and how to write software. The approach will be hands on and task driven.

The price covers 10 hours of learning, split over 2 hour evening sessions, once a week for 5 weeks. Lessons will be held in a teaching venue in the Holborn area. I understand different people learn at different rate so I am happy to adjust the pace or dive deeper into topics as we progress.

Lesson Structure

Lesson 1: Coding Environment and Basic Syntax

How to set up your machine to write and run code. Basic components of the Python language. Strings, Integers, Booleans.

Lesson 2: Data Structures and Computer Architecture

How is information stored in a computer? How can we lay out our information and processing structures to leverage this? Lists, tuples, dictionaries.

Lesson 3: Control Flow and Logic

How to express logic within code. Boolean logic, conditional statements and loops.

Lesson 4: External Calls

How to communicate with other pieces of software. Importing libraries, APIs and file handling.

Lesson 5: Project

Put the pieces together to build a simple program. This can be of your choosing, or choose from: naughts and Crosses, Chess, SQL Backend, Computer Vision Handwriting Classifier.

Prerequisites

MacOS or Windows 10/11 Laptop.

An interest in learning programming.

About me:

I have been writing software since I graduated from Imperial College in 2019 . I have worked on traffic management systems for the Swedish government, computer vision systems to reduce orchard waste and a reinforcement learning system to reduce the electrical waste of industrial sites.

I look forward to working with you, James

Introductory Programming in Python