Introduction to Computing and Programming in Python, A Multimedia Approach, 2nd Edition

About

Features

Relevant context (Computing for Communications) — Shows students that computing has a role in their professions and that it’s worth learning.

 

Manipulation of media — Includes implementing Photoshop-like effects, reversing/splicing sounds, creating animations, etc.

 

Use of Python — Provides a programming language that is easier to learn and use than Java or Scheme in real commercial use (e.g., Google, Industrial Light & Magic).

 

HTML — Acknowledges that students in this audience care about the Web; introduces HTML and covers writing programs that generate HTML.

 

The Web as a Data Source — Teaches how to read from files, but also discusses how to write programs to directly read Web pages and distill information from there for use in other calculations, other Web pages, etc.

~Examples include temperature from a weather page, stock prices from a financials page.

Real CS1 content — Meets the ACM/IEEE Computing Curriculum 2001 guidelines for a CS1 course, including coverage of procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming approaches, even though the book has been used most with non-CS majors.

 

Brief JavaScript introduction — Helps students recognize that they can learn a second language.

 

Full-chapter treatment of GUIs.

 

Exercises at the end of each chapter, including programming projects.

~Many of these projects involve creative, open-ended programming for media creation (e.g., creating visual or audio collages.

~Several encourage exploration of cross-disciplinary issues between computer science and other professions.  

Four types of boxed items — Includes CS Key Ideas, Common Bugs, Debugging Tips, and “Making It Work” tips on how to study and be successful at computer science.

 

List of learning objectives at the start of each chapter — Most chapters have two lists: One with the media learning objectives (e.g., “Be able to explain how a grayscale image can be created from a color image”) and computer science learning objectives (e.g., “Be able to explain the role of modularity in debugging”).

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Description

• Copyright 2010
• Edition: 2nd

• Book
• ISBN-10: 0-13-606023-4
• ISBN-13: 978-0-13-606023-9

For courses in Introduction to Computing or Introduction to Programming.

 

There is a growing interest in computing for non-CS majors, or for students who have not yet determined their majors (sometimes called the “CS0” market). Computer science professors are also confronted with increased attrition and failure rates. Guzdial introduces programming as a way of creating and manipulating media–a context familiar and intriguing to today’s students. Students begin actual programming early on (sometimes over 100 lines of code in the second assignment). Guzdial’s approach has met with substantial success in class testing.

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Sample Content

Table of Contents

I. Introduction

Chapter 1 Introduction to Computer Science and Media Computation

            1.1 What Is Computer Science About?

            1.2 Programming Languages

            1.3 What Computers Understand

            1.4 Media Computation: Why Digitize Media?

            1.5 Computer Science for Everyone

                1.5.1 It’s About Communication

                1.5.2 It’s About Process

Chapter 2 Introduction to Programming

            2.1 Programming Is About Naming

                2.1.1 Files and Their Names

            2.2 Programming in Python

            2.3 Programming in JES

            2.4 Media Computation in JES

                2.4.1 Showing a Picture

                2.4.2 Playing a Sound

                2.4.3 Naming Values

            2.5 Making a Program

                2.5.1 Variable Recipes: Real Math-like Functions That Take Input

II Pictures

Chapter 3 Modifying Pictures Using Loops

            3.1 How Pictures Are Encoded

            3.2 Manipulating Pictures

                3.2.1 Exploring Pictures

            3.3 Changing Color Values

                3.3.1 Using Loops in Pictures

                3.3.2 Increasing/Decreasing Red (Green, Blue)

                3.3.3 Testing the Program: Did That ReallyWork?

                3.3.4 Changing one Color at a Time

            3.4 Creating a Sunset

                3.4.1 Making Sense of Functions

            3.5 Lightening and Darkening

            3.6 Creating a Negative

            3.7 Converting to Grayscale

Chapter 4 Modifying Pixels in a Range

            4.1 Copying Pixels

                4.1.1 Looping Across the Pixels with range

            4.2 Mirroring a Picture

            4.3 Copying and Transforming Pictures

                4.3.1 Copying

                4.3.2 Creating a Collage

                4.3.3 General Copying

                4.3.4 Rotation

                4.3.5 Scaling

Chapter 5 Advanced Picture Techniques

            5.1 Replacing Colors: Red-Eye, Sepia Tones, and Posterizing

                5.1.1 Reducing Red-Eye

                5.1.2 Sepia-Toned and Posterized Pictures: Using Conditionals

                          to Choose the Color

            5.2 Combining Pixels: Blurring

            5.3 Comparing Pixels: Edge Detection

            5.4 Blending Pictures

            5.5 Background Subtraction

            5.6 Chromakey

            5.7 Drawing on Images

                5.7.1 Drawing with Drawing Commands

                5.7.2 Vector and Bitmap Representations

            5.8 Programs as Specifying Drawing Process

                5.8.1 Why DoWe Write Programs?

Chapter 6 Modifying Sounds Using Loops

            6.1 How Sound Is Encoded

                6.1.1 The Physics of Sound

                6.1.2 Exploring How Sounds Look

                6.1.3 Encoding the Sound

                6.1.4 Binary Numbers and Two’s Complement

                6.1.5 Storing Digitized Sounds

            6.2 Manipulating Sounds

                6.2.1 Open Sounds and Manipulating Samples

                6.2.2 Using the JES MediaTools

                6.2.3 Looping

            6.3 Changing the Volume of Sounds

                6.3.1 Increasing Volume

                6.3.2 Did That ReallyWork?

                6.3.3 Decreasing Volume

                6.3.4 Making Sense of Functions, in Sounds

            6.4 Normalizing Sounds

                6.4.1 Generating Clipping

Chapter 7 Modifying Samples in a Range

            7.1 Manipulating Different Sections of the Sound Differently

            7.2 Splicing Sounds

            7.3 General Clip and Copy

            7.4 Backwards Sounds

            7.5 Mirroring

Chapter 8 Making Sounds by Combining Pieces

            8.1 Composing Sounds Through Addition

            8.2 Blending Sounds

            8.3 Creating an Echo

                8.3.1 Creating Multiple Echoes

                8.3.2 Creating Chords

            8.4 How Sampling KeyboardsWork

                8.4.1 Sampling as an Algorithm

            8.5 Additive Synthesis

                8.5.1 Making SineWaves

                8.5.2 Adding SineWaves Together

                8.5.3 Checking Our Result

                8.5.4 SquareWaves

                8.5.5 TriangleWaves

            8.6 Modern Music Synthesis

                8.6.1 MP3

                8.6.2 MIDI

Chapter 9 Building Bigger Programs

            9.1 Designing Programs Top-Down

                9.1.1 A Top-Down Design Example

            9.1.2 Designing the top-level function

                9.1.3 Writing the subfunctions

            9.2 Designing Programs Bottom-up

                9.2.1 An Example Bottom-Up Process

            9.3 TestingYour Program

                9.3.1 Testing the Edge Conditions

            9.4 Tips on Debugging

                9.4.1 Finding Which Statement toWorry About

                9.4.2 Seeing the Variables

                9.4.3 Debugging the Adventure Game

            9.5 Algorithms and Design

            9.6 Running Programs Outside of JES

IV Text, Files, Networks, Databases, and Unimedia

Chapter 10 Creating and Modifying Text

            10.1 Text as Unimedia

            10.2 Strings: Making and Manipulating Strings

            10.3 Manipulating parts of strings

                10.3.1 String Methods: Introducing Objects and Dot Notation

                10.3.2 Lists: Powerful, Structured Text

                10.3.3 Strings Have No Font

            10.4 Files: Places to PutYour Strings and Other Stuff

                10.4.1 Opening and Manipulating Files

                10.4.2 Generating Form Letters

                10.4.3 Writing Out Programs

            10.5 The Python Standard Library

                10.5.1 More on Import andYour Own Modules

                10.5.2 Another Fun Module: Random

                10.5.3 A Sampling of Python Standard Libraries

Chapter 11 Advanced Text Techniques:Web and Information

            11.1 Networks: Getting Our Text from theWeb

            11.2 Using Text to Shift Between Media

                11.2.1 Using Lists as Structured Text for Media Representations

            11.3 Hiding Information in a Picture

Chapter 12 Making Text for theWeb

            12.1 HTML: The Notation of theWeb

            12.2 Writing Programs to Generate HTML

            12.3 Databases: A Place to Store Our Text

                12.3.1 Relational Databases

                12.3.2 An example relational database using hash tables

                12.3.3 Working with SQL

                12.3.4 Using a Database to BuildWeb Pages

Chapter 13 Creating and Modifying Movies

            13.1 Generating Animations

            13.2 Working with Video Source

                13.2.1 Video Manipulating Examples

            13.3 Building a Video Effect Bottom-Up

Chapter 14 Speed

            14.1 Focusing on Computer Science

            14.2 What Makes Programs Fast?

                14.2.1 What Computers Really Understand

                14.2.2 Compilers and Interpreters

                14.2.3 What Limits Computer Speed?

                14.2.4 Making Searching Faster

                14.2.5 Algorithms That Never Finish or Can’t Be Written

                14.2.6 Why Is Photoshop Faster Than JES?

            14.3 What Makes a Computer Fast?

                14.3.1 Clock Rates and Actual Computation

                14.3.2 Storage: What Makes a Computer Slow?

                14.3.3 Display

Chapter 15 Functional Programming

            15.1 Using Functions to Make Programming Easier

            15.2 Functional Programming with Map and Reduce

            15.3 Functional Programming for Media

                15.3.1 Media Manipulation without Changing State

            15.4 Recursion: A Powerful Idea

                15.4.1 Recursive Directory Traversals

                15.4.2 Recursive Media Functions

Chapter 16 Object-Oriented Programming

            16.1 History

            16.2 WorkingWith Turtles

                16.2.1 Classes and Objects

                16.2.2 Creating Objects

                16.2.3 Sending Messages to Objects

                16.2.4 Objects Control Their State

                16.2.5 Other Turtle Functions

            16.3 Teaching Turtles New Tricks

            16.4 An Object-Oriented Slide Show

                16.4.1 Joe the Box

                16.4.2 Object-Oriented Media

                16.4.3 Why Objects?

APPENDICES

A Quick Reference to Python

            A.1 Variables

            A.2 Function Creation

            A.3 Loops and Conditionals

            A.4 Operators and Representation Functions

            A.5 Numeric Functions

            A.6 Sequence Operations

            A.7 String Escapes

            A.8 Useful String Methods

            A.9 Files

            A.10 Lists

            A.11 Dictionaries, Hash Tables, or Associative Arrays

            A.12 External Modules

            A.13 Classes

            A.14 Functional Methods

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