Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python

6.0001 is MIT's fall 2016 half-semester introduction to programming for students with little or no prior experience, taught by Ana Bell, Eric Grimson and John Guttag and published in full on OpenCourseWare. It uses Python 3.5 and sets out to make students confident writing small programs that do something useful. The twelve recorded lectures start with what computation is, then cover branching and iteration; string manipulation, guess-and-check and bisection; decomposition, abstraction and functions; tuples, lists, aliasing and mutability; recursion and dictionaries; testing, debugging, exceptions and assertions; object-oriented programming; Python classes and inheritance; and two lectures on understanding program efficiency. Alongside the lecture videos, the site gives you the lecture slides and code, the in-class questions with video solutions, readings, and the problem sets with example programming assignments.

There is no instructor, grading or deadline: you download the materials and work at your own pace. Access is free and no registration is needed, and, like all OpenCourseWare, the content carries a Creative Commons licence and no certificate is available. If you want a graded version of this material with an optional paid certificate, MITx Online runs the companion course 6.00.1x.