CMPT 120 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Symbolic Computation, Problem Solving

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Computing Science
• Course: CMPT 120
• Professor: Liaqat Ali

Document Summary

Think python: chapter 1 - the way of the program. The single most important skill for a computer scientist is problem solving. Problem solving means the ability to formulate problems, think creatively about solutions, and express a solution clearly and accurately. A program is a sequence of instructions that specifies how to perform a computation. You can think of programming as the process of breaking a large, complex task into smaller and smaller subtasks until the subtasks are simple enough to be performed with one of these basic instructions. There are a number of web pages you can use to run python. I provide detailed instructions for getting started at http://tinyurl. com/thinkpython2e. There are two versions of python, called python 2 and python 3. They are very similar, so if you learn one, it is easy to switch to the other. In fact, there are only a few differences you will encounter as a beginner.