Carnegie Mellon University

MSCF Programming Prep

Course Number: MSCF Prep

Concentration: Programming
Semester(s): Fall
Required/Elective: Required
Prerequisite(s): None

The Programming Prep course is intended to make sure that incoming MSCF students have a solid understanding of basic Python, up to the level of top-down, procedural programming and the use of some important Python modules, such as math and Numpy.  Topics covered will be: 

  1. The Python shell and various IDEs (Integrated Development Environments): IDLE, Spyder, Jupyter,
  2. Literals, variables, assignment, and basic data types: intfloatstrbool, and NoneType(None)
  3. Arithmetic, equality, relational, and logical operations
  4. Loops (forand while) and decisions (if/elif/.../else)
  5. Function definitions and calls, arguments, return values, variable scope rules
  6. Built-in data structures: tuplelistsetdict
  7. Reading and writing files, handling user input, producing formatted output
  8. Recursion and dynamic programming
  9. Using NumPy: numerical arrays, statistical and linear algebra facilities