Means, Not Ends

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Edsger Dijkstra

Game Plan#

This is not a course in computer science; it is merely an introduction to coding, an enough of an introduction to give you the fundamentals found in almost all programming language and give you enough proficiency to strike out on your own.

To that end, we’ll:

  • use Python for our programming language

  • work through exercises or drills

  • engage in some brief quizzes and

  • build small and larger projects, the last being an internet search engine

The search engine will crawl the web, index pages, and returns ranked results for a given query.

Along the way, you will learn some computer science and, because the web is part of the over arching project, something of the workings of the internet.

But, remember, whatever the particulars of any given programming, computer science, or coding curriculum, the very core is problem solving, i.e., how to analyze issues, assemble the means to solve them, and put it altogether in a program.