Design of Computer Programs (Udacity)

Move along the path towards becoming an expert programmer! In this class you will practice going from a problem description to a solution, using a series of assignments. During office hours segments, Peter will also share his own personal tips and tricks for approaching programming problems - and his techniques may surprise you!

What You Will Learn

Lesson 1
Winning Poker Hands

• Steps of the design process and developing for clarity and generality.
• Arguments for program correctness and experimentation and simulation.
• Design tradeoffs; Simplicity and Clarity. Decomposition and composability.

Lesson 2
Back of the Envelope

• Back of envelope calculations: When to use brute force and when to be clever.
• The Zebra puzzle: Generator expressions
• Permutations and combinations.
• Cryptarithmetic; Recursive and wishful thinking; Longest palindrome substring algorithm.

Lesson 3
Regular Expressions, other languages and interpreters

• Defining the language of regular expressions and Interpreting the language.
• Defining the set of strings matched by a regular expression
• Other languages.

Lesson 4
Dealing with complexity through search

• Search: finding your way with a flashlight or boat.
• Analyzing the efficiency of an algorithm.
• Recurrence relations and Matching data types with algorithms.

Lesson 5
Dealing with uncertainty through probability

• Probability: the game of Pig.
• Maximizing expected utility to optimize strategy.

Lesson 6
Word Games

• Managing complexity.
• Large sets of words.
• Appropriate data structures.

Lesson 7
Conclusion

• Interviews and practice exam.

Prerequisites and Requirements
This course is intended for experienced Python programmers; students should be familiar with the Python syntax, as well as familiar with the following programming concepts: data structures, basic algorithms, and lambda functions.This course is intended to challenge you. Be ready to struggle (and learn)!