Python for Absolute Beginners Transcripts
Chapter: The big ideas of software development
Lecture: The big ideas
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Are you ready to cover the big ideas of computer programming and computer science? We're going to try to go through them quickly.
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After all, this is not a computer science course and definitely not a whole degree in it. But there are a few things that you need to have a good
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conceptual understanding of. Even if you can't get down to the details and work on them right away, that's fine.
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But just a big conceptual understanding for some of these core ideas in computer programming and computer science.
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We're going to start by talking about what is code and how does it execute? Probably you've seen some code before but maybe you haven't.
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And we're going to look at Python source code and compare it to a few other languages. And then we're going to look deep inside the CPython runtime
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to see what happens when you create some Python source code and then you go through all the steps to turn that into an executing program.
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Those steps for you are just say Python, run this application. But there's a bunch of stuff happening that is good
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to know about. It's good to have a conceptual understanding of course. Next, we're going to talk about algorithms.
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What are algorithms? Cover a popular one. How you learn about more. How do you create or reuse an algorithm?
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So we're going to talk a little bit about this idea of algorithms and tie that back to problem-solving a little bit more generally.
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And then something super-important that I'm very excited to present right up near the front of the course
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is the difference between experts and beginner developers or professional and beginner developers, besides of course just getting paid.
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How do they approach problem-solving? How do they structure their code? What are the various things that you need to go through
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or acquire as a beginner? What skills do you need to acquire? What mindset do you need to think about before you can make
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that transition over to expert developer? So we're going to talk real briefly about some of those ideas
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and techniques and how you can get more information there. And finally, one of the big ideas that we're not really
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covering in this chapter is data structures. So algorithms and data structures, those are big big parts of thinking in computer science terms
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in addition to just knowing the programming language and the tools. The reason we're not talking about data structures
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is because we're saving that for later in the course. When we get deep into a program, we're going to start talking about the different data structures
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and using them together to start problem-solving. So data structures is also one of the big ideas that belongs here but we're going to give it it's own
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special treatment later because it is really important.