Questions: This term we will be using Piazza for class discussion. The system is aimed at getting you help quickly and efficiently from both classmates and the 6.S189 staff.

Find our class page at: Piazza/6.S189

Textbook

The course textbook is How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (PDF) by Allen Downey. If you have trouble accessing the textbook, or don't want to download the whole PDF, try the individual chapters:

The lectures stick with the order of the textbook for the most part, but not always. Feel free to email the staff if you have any questions.

Python resources

Python Tutorial, by Guido Van Rossum
This is the standard tutorial reference by the inventor of Python. Everyone should have a bookmark for it in their browser for reference. For learning programming, however, start with one of the references below.

Learning Python, by David Ascher and Mark Lutz
The O'Reilly book; assumes little/no programming experience, but is quite long and covers topics in great detail. (You need an MIT Certificate to view this one)

IDLE

Official IDLE Documentation
The official Python IDLE documentation, including keyboard shortcuts, debugging, etc.