Coding Academy 2015

Programming is more than just a hobby, or a job, or a means to an end. Programming has helped me transform my brain. It’s brought out inner logic and organisation, it’s made me more rational and efficient and, since first picking it up at a very early age, it’s given me a tendency to think in IF...THEN arguments. Don’t judge me, I can’t help it. Whether you’re a dyed-in-the-wool coding type or a beginner hoping to get started and produce your first programming projects, there should be something for you in Coding Academy 2016. We’ve consulted with a host of respected experts in its construction, and forced them to use language (and languages) understandable by mere mortals in their approach. We concentrate mainly on Python, that most human-readable of languages,…

In this section, we’ll be using Python to broach many of the fundamental concepts of coding. Here we look at basic data types; in later articles, we’ll look at a few more advanced topics that build on what we do here: data abstraction, fancy structures such as trees, and more. What is data? In the world, and in the programs that we’ll write, there’s an amazing variety of different types of data. In a mortgage calculator, for example, the value of the mortgage, the interest rate and the term of the loan are all types of data; in a shopping list program, there are all the different types of food and the list that stores them – each of which has its own kind of data. The computer’s world is…

In the previous tutorial, we introduced Python’s most common data types: numbers (ints and floats), strings, lists, tuples and dictionaries. We demonstrated how they work with different operators, and explained a few of their most useful methods. We didn’t, however, give much insight into how they might be used in real situations. In this article, we’re going to fix that. We’re going to write a program that counts the number of times each unique word occurs in a text file. Punctuation marks will be excluded, and if the same word occurs but in different cases (for example, the and The), they will be taken to represent a single word. Finally, the program will print the results to the screen. It should look like this: As an example, we’ll be using…

In the previous few tutorials, we have been looking at data. First, we introduced some of Python’s core data types, and then we demonstrated how they can be put to use when solving a real problem. The next data-related topic we want to consider is abstraction, but before we get on to that, we’re first going to look at abstraction – both in general and as it applies to procedures. So, this time we’ll take a brief hiatus from data, before returning to it in a later article. Square roots To get our heads around the concept of abstraction, let’s start by thinking about square roots and different techniques for finding them. One of these was discovered by Newton, and is thus known as Newton’s method. Newton’s method states that…

“If the filesystem knows the file is being changed, it won’t allow access” For the majority of programming projects, you don’t get far before facing the age-old problem of how to get data into and out of your application. Whether it’s using punched cards to get patterns into a 19th century Jacquard textile loom, or Google’s bots skimming websites for data to feed its search engine, dealing with external input is as fundamental as programming itself. And it’s a problem and a concept that you may be more familiar with on the Linux command line. When you type ls to list the contents of the current directory, for example, the command is reading in the contents of a file – the current directory – then outputting the contents to another:…

“You now know more than enough to start writing real programs” In the next few pages, that’s what we’re aiming to do: get you writing real programs. Over the next few tutorials, we’re going to create a Python implementation of the popular Unix tool cat. Like all Unix tools, cat is a great target because it’s small and focused on a single task, while using different operating system features, including accessing files, pipes and so on. This means it won’t take too long to complete, but will also expose you to a selection of Python’s core features in the Standard Library, and once you’ve mastered the basics, it’s learning the ins-and-outs of your chosen language’s libraries that will let you get on with real work. Our goal for the project…