Currently used at many colleges, universities, and high schools, this hands-on introduction to computer science is ideal for people with little or no programming experience. The goal of this concise book is not just to teach you Java, but to help you think like a computer scientist. You’ll learn how to program—a useful skill by itself—but you’ll also discover how to use programming as a means to an end. Authors Allen Downey and Chris Mayfield start with the most basic concepts and gradually move into topics that are more complex, such as recursion and object-oriented programming. Each brief chapter covers the material for one week of a college course and includes exercises to help you practice what you’ve learned. Learn one concept at a time: tackle complex topics in a series of small steps with examples Understand how to formulate problems, think creatively about solutions, and write programs clearly and accurately Determine which development techniques work best for you, and practice the important skill of debugging Learn relationships among input and output, decisions and loops, classes and methods, strings and arrays Work on exercises involving word games, graphics, puzzles, and playing cards

The goal of this book is to teach you to think like a computer scientist. This way of thinking combines some of the best features of mathematics, engineering, and natural science. Like mathematicians, computer scientists use formal languages to denote ideas (specifically computations). Like engineers, they design things, assembling components into systems and evaluating tradeoffs among alternatives. Like scientists, they observe the behavior of complex systems, form hypotheses, and test predictions. The single most important skill for a computer scientist is problem solving. Problem solving means the ability to formulate problems, think creatively about solutions, and express a solution clearly and accurately. As it turns out, the process of learning to program is an excellent opportunity to practice problem-solving skills. That's why this chapter is called, The way of the program. On one level, you will be learning to program, a useful skill by itself. On another level, you will use programming as a means to an end. As we go along, that end will become clearer.

Provides link to sites where book in zip file can be downloaded.

Dive into Python's advanced possibilities, including algorithm analysis, graphs, scale-free networks, and cellular automata with this in-depth, hands-on guide.

If you understand basic mathematics and know how to program with Python, you’re ready to dive into signal processing. While most resources start with theory to teach this complex subject, this practical book introduces techniques by showing you how they’re applied in the real world. In the first chapter alone, you’ll be able to decompose a sound into its harmonics, modify the harmonics, and generate new sounds. Author Allen Downey explains techniques such as spectral decomposition, filtering, convolution, and the Fast Fourier Transform. This book also provides exercises and code examples to help you understand the material. You’ll explore: Periodic signals and their spectrums Harmonic structure of simple waveforms Chirps and other sounds whose spectrum changes over time Noise signals and natural sources of noise The autocorrelation function for estimating pitch The discrete cosine transform (DCT) for compression The Fast Fourier Transform for spectral analysis Relating operations in time to filters in the frequency domain Linear time-invariant (LTI) system theory Amplitude modulation (AM) used in radio Other books in this series include Think Stats and Think Bayes, also by Allen Downey.

Your customers want rock-solid, bug-free software that does exactly what they expect it to do. Yet they can't always articulate their ideas clearly enough for you to turn them into code. You need Cucumber: a testing, communication, and requirements tool-all rolled into one. All the code in this book is updated for Cucumber 2.4, Rails 5, and RSpec 3.5. Express your customers' wild ideas as a set of clear, executable specifications that everyone on the team can read. Feed those examples into Cucumber and let it guide your development. Build just the right code to keep your customers happy. You can use Cucumber to test almost any system or any platform. Get started by using the core features of Cucumber and working with Cucumber's Gherkin DSL to describe-in plain language-the behavior your customers want from the system. Then write Ruby code that interprets those plain-language specifications and checks them against your application. Next, consolidate the knowledge you've gained with a worked example, where you'll learn more advanced Cucumber techniques, test asynchronous systems, and test systems that use a database. Recipes highlight some of the most difficult and commonly seen situations the authors have helped teams solve. With these patterns and techniques, test Ajax-heavy web applications with Capybara and Selenium, REST web services, Ruby on Rails applications, command-line applications, legacy applications, and more. Written by the creator of Cucumber and the co-founders of Cucumber Ltd., this authoritative guide will give you and your team all the knowledge you need to start using Cucumber with confidence. What You Need: Windows, Mac OS X (with XCode) or Linux, Ruby 1.9.2 and upwards, Cucumber 2.4, Rails 5, and RSpec 3.5

Currently used at many colleges, universities, and high schools, this hands-on introduction to computer science is ideal for people with little or no programming experience. The goal of this concise book is not just to teach you Java, but to help you think like a computer scientist. You’ll learn how to program—a useful skill by itself—but you’ll also discover how to use programming as a means to an end. Authors Allen Downey and Chris Mayfield start with the most basic concepts and gradually move into topics that are more complex, such as recursion and object-oriented programming. Each brief chapter covers the material for one week of a college course and includes exercises to help you practice what you’ve learned. Learn one concept at a time: tackle complex topics in a series of small steps with examples Understand how to formulate problems, think creatively about solutions, and write programs clearly and accurately Determine which development techniques work best for you, and practice the important skill of debugging Learn relationships among input and output, decisions and loops, classes and methods, strings and arrays Work on exercises involving word games, graphics, puzzles, and playing cards The updated second edition of Think Java also features new chapters on polymorphism and data processing, as well as content covering changes through Java 12.