About
Wanna hear something scary? I first started programming in high school, in 1976, when one of my math teachers managed to score some time-sharing on a local hospital's Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11. No PCs, no Internet... just this giant teletype, beeping, squawking, and clacking away in one corner while we sat at our desks and wrote programs on paper, waiting for our turn to sit down at the keyboard. Good times!
Fast forward a couple years, and I'm an Information & Computer Science major at UC Irvine. A few years after that I'm teaching programming on PCs to high school students, in BASIC and Pascal. And after a few years teaching physics up and down the state, I stumbled into Poly, which brings us to this course.
The Polytechnic School Computer Science course is intended to provide an introduction to some topics in computer science, especially programming, software engineering, data structures, and algorithms. We'll be conducting our studies using Mac laptops, which run Unix underneath their OS X operating system, and using Python—a powerful but easy to learn language—for the majority of our programming.
This website will serve as a focal point for our studies. Whether checking on assignments, looking for programming hints, or uploading your assignment to the server, you'll be using this site quite a bit. I hope it serves you well!