These are lecture notes for the UCSC CSE20: Beginning Programming in Python course

Each lecture is composed of a Jupyter notebook.

The lecture syllabus is here: https://bit.ly/intro_python_00

You can view each of these notebooks using Google Colab.

Google Colab provides a notebook environment you can run from your web browser without installing any software.

Step 1: open Google Colab.

Step 2: paste https://github.com/benedictpaten/intro_python into the Github URL search box under the Github tab (hit return).

Step 3: pick the notebook for the lecture you want.

For an introduction to using Google Colab (and Juptyer Notebooks in general) see the following tutorial.

To install and use these notebooks on your computer with Jupyter

If you prefer to have these notebooks installed on your computer and to use Jupyter to edit them follow the following instructions. Note, these instructions use the classic Jupyter notebook environment. You may prefer to install the more powerful JupyterLab, which provides a more full-fledged IDE for editing. However, for simplicity, I like the former.

These instructions should work on Linux or Mac OS and require you to be familiar with using unix shell commands (e.g. with a terminal app). It is not necessary to install these notebooks on your computer to take this course.

First, make sure you have python3 installed on your computer.

Next make a directory to hold the notebooks:

mkdir cse20 && cd cse20

To avoid problems with conflicting versions of dependencies on your system, we strongly recommend installing these notebooks inside a Python 3 virtual environment. To install the virtualenv command, if you don't have it already, run:

python3 -m pip install virtualenv

To set up a virtual environment in the directory python_intro_env, run:

python3 -m virtualenv -p python3.11 python_intro_env

Note that here I am using Python 3.11, but you may wish to choose a different version, which you can change by specifying a different number string, i.e. python3.9

Then, to enter the virtualenv, run:

source python_intro_env/bin/activate

You can always exit the virtualenv by running deactivate.

To install these notebooks in Python, clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/benedictpaten/intro_python.git
cd intro_python

Now install Jupyter and some Python packages we'll use:

pip install notebook
pip install RISE
pip install numpy
pip install pandas
pip install matplotlib
pip install scikit-learn

Now make this virtual environment accessible to Jupyter:

ipython kernel install --user --name=intro_python_env

Now you're ready to run the notebooks:

jupyter notebook

A browser should then open showing you the running Juptyer notebook launch page. Simply navigate to the desired notebook and select it to open. To use the virtual environment click on the Kernel menu and then click "Change kernel" and selecting the "intro_python_env" option. That's it, you should be set use all the features of these notebooks.

Later, after following the above steps, if you want to start the notebook server again (e.g. after shutting down the computer) simply navigate to the cse20 directory in the terminal and then execute the following two commands:

source python_intro_env/bin/activate
jupyter notebook

When you're finished with these notebooks you just need to delete the parent directory (cse20) and everything we've installed (including all the notebooks, Jupyter and Python packages, but not including Python3) will be removed.

rm -rf cse20

Building html versions of the notebooks as slides

If you've followed the above instructions to download and run the notebooks on your computer you can build html formatted versions of the slides by running the make_slides.sh script in the intro_python subdirectory:

./make_slides.sh

However, you may prefer to use RISE to view the slides (it is installed with the above instructions). RISE allows you to interactively edit and run the notebook and toggle back and forth into a slide viewer.

Practice Exams

For CSE20 we are moving to all paper exams to prevent the use of code assistant tools (chatGPT etc.). In the exams folder you can find a couple of practice Jupyter notebook format exams to test your knowledge. These were used previously in the course.