Structured Programming

This is an introductory programming course that teaches basic concepts in imperative and object-oriented programming and corresponding data structures for students with some previous programming experience. Students will learn to use an industrial-strength object-oriented programming language and form basic mental models of how computer programs execute and interact with their environment. The course focuses on key aspects of solving programming problems: reasoning about a problem description to design appropriate data representations and function/method descriptions, to find examples, to write, test, debug, and otherwise evaluate the relevant code, and to present and defend their approach. Students will learn to effectively use a large standard library and key standard data structures, including lists, trees, hash tables, and graphs. The course also introduces the basics of reasoning about the time and space complexity of algorithms, in particular as related to the above data structures.