Preface

This book is designed to introduce the reader to the field of computer Science. It is intended to be used in a one-semester college level course. It could also be used for self-study.

This book uses the Python programming language for coding. However the goal is not really to cover Python itself. Instead Python is just used as a means to learn about developing algorithms and solving problems. In particular, we will not spend too much time talking about Python-specific features. We will also not always do things in the most Python-specific way. For example, we will look at how to solve some problems “by hand” that could be done just by calling Python methods. The goal of this book is to teach you the core ideas of computer science which are independent of any particular language.

This book is freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It is intended to serve as an open resource to anyone looking to learn about computer science.

The background of the cover image is taken by G. Lamar on Flickr and is used under a Creative Commons BY 2.0 License.