Explore the nature of programming and how programming a computer is different than using a computer.

In this lecture we learn abut how the computer processes and stores programs. We learn about the CPU, Memory, Storage and Input / Output devices are brought together to write a program.

We look at how writing programs is just another form of communication. Instead of communicating with another person, we are communicating our ideas to a computer.

We look at the basics of the Python language and how we write code in Python to communicate sequential steps, conditional steps and repeated steps.

We look at Python's reserved words, how we name and use variables, why we choose meaningful (mnemonic) variable names and how assignment statements function.

We look at how we use various numerical and string operations to compute new information and store the new values in variables.

The most basic conditional structure is the if statement where we either execute or skip a segment of code based on the results of a logical expression (i.e. asking a question).

In this lecture we look at multi-branch if statements and the try-except concept where we can indicate a group of statements to be executed if something goes wrong with a block of statements.

We look at how code flows into and out of functions as well has how we pass information into functions and get results returned to us.

We look at how to build our own functions using parameters and arguments as well as how we return results to the code that is calling our functions.

We look at how we construct a loop so that it runs as long as we want it to run. We learn about iteration variables and exiting loops with the 'break' and 'continue' statements.

We learn how to use the 'for' statement in Python to loop through a set of data.

Loops have a beginning, middle, and end. We look ant how we construct a loop to look at a list of items one at a time so we can compute an overall maximum, minimum or average.

We continue to look at how to construct loops including how to do something special the first time through the loop. We introduce the idea of 'None' which is a way to indicate that a variable is currently empty.

We learn how to create string variables and extract portions of the data as well as write simple loops to read through the characters in a string.

We learn how to extract substrings using slicing, and use the string library to perform common data extraction operations with strings.

We look at how text and lines are represented in files, how we open a file and write a loop to read through all the lines in the file.

We look at patterns for reading and processing the data in files. We learn how to check for nonexistent files, and how we process each line within the file.

We learn how to put data into lists, take data out of the list and write simple loops to examine the elements of a list.

We learn about list slicing, list searching, and using pre-defined functions with lists.