Foundations of Programming with Python

General Tips

1. Create a new file for EACH exercise (unless stated otherwise) or topic. Keeping everything in the same files makes it much harder to spot mistakes since they could stem from previous code parts.
2. Always check your editor for red squiggly lines -> There is something wrong with your code (don't forget to save after you changed something)
3. Save often, run often:
   1. Save your file regularly so you don't accidentally lose progress if your computer crashes.
   2. Run the code often. Try to split the code in the small completable steps which you can quickly check by running. Writing one big block in one go is especially hard in the beginning.

Downloading the solutions

To download the solutions click the green button Clone or download where you have the option to either download a zip file with all the contents that you see here or you can also clone the repository.

This is the repository for the programming course offered by the ITC of the University of Zurich. The solutions to the exercises can be found inside the solutions folder. The presentation and the exercise itself can be found inside the slides folder.

For some of the exercises there are slight variations available:

Exercise 4

Instead of working with 6 arguments per function we create a class called Point3D. This encapsulates the 3 invidivual coordinates of a point inside a single object which can be used in our code.

Excercise 9

Similarly exercise 9 also makes use of a class. This time the class is called Student.

To read more about classes click here

Custom Exercises

The folder custom exercises contains (yet) undocumented python code. If you are interested in plotting data check out Simple_Plot.py. In order to run this example you have to install numpy and matplotlib. For this open a terminal and type the following:

python -m pip install numpy

python -m pip install matplotlib

Afterwards you should be able to run this plotting example.

Another example worth looking at is the TryExcept.py. This shows you how to avoid complete crashes with the try-except (also known try-catch) mechanism. This allows us to write code which can recover from hard errors (like division by 0, or file not found errors)