PHOT 110 Introduction to Programming

These lectures were given over 14 weeks (2 hours theory + 2 hours practice) since the spring semester of 2023-2024, please see also the current syllabus below. The theory slides were here restructured to reduce any repetition and references to in-class exercises. Many errors likely remained however and comments are welcome.

Exams (and example exams) of both the final and midterm exams are provided further down. If you are a student using the exam examples to study, be aware that the course can undergo changes over the years.

Study guidance

• Syllabus (pdf)
• Python online references (pdf)
• Python cheat sheet of Laurent Poinsot (pdf)
• Numpy cheat sheet from DataCamp (pdf)
• Matplotlib (beginner) cheat sheet from Matplotlib (pdf)
• Matplotlib (intermediate ) cheat sheet from Matplotlib (pdf)

Further background materials

• "Introduction to Scientific Computing in Python" by Robert Johansson Course notes IPython notebooks corresponding to the course.

Lecture materials

Lecture	Topics	Slides	Tasks
1	Course introduction	(pdf)
1	Introduction to computers & algorithms	(pdf)
2	Python basics	(pdf) (html)	(pdf)
3	Control flow, branching, lists, and iterators	(pdf) (html)	(pdf)
4	Iteration, sequences, strings, and arrays	(pdf) (html)	(pdf)
5	Iteration, sequences, strings, and arrays (part B)		(pdf)
6	Arrays and simple plots		(pdf)
7	Functions	(pdf) (html)
8	Input/Output and error-handling	(pdf) (html)
9	Modules & script documentation	(pdf) (html)	(pdf)
10	Arrays, vectors & linear algebra	(pdf) (html)
11	Plots and visualizations	(pdf) (html)	(pdf)
12	Data, Dictionaries, and Pandas	(pdf) (html)	(pdf)
13	Classes, class hierarchy, special methods	(pdf) (html)	(pdf)
14	Testing, Debugging, and Performance		(pdf)

Additional course materials

Content	File(s)
Script (.py) solutions of in-class exercises	(zip)
Sample files for exercises (lecture 11)	(zip)
First project (topics description)	(pdf)
Second project (topics description)	(pdf)

Exam questions & solutions

These are questions and solutions of example exams and/or previous midterm and final exams (and retake opportunities)

Year	Exam name	Questions	Solutions
2023-2024	Midterm exam	(pdf)	(pdf)
2023-2024	Midterm exam (retake)	(pdf)	(pdf)
2023-2024	Midterm exam (2nd retake)	(pdf)	(pdf)
2023-2024	Example final exam	(pdf)	(pdf)
2023-2024	Final exam	(pdf)	(pdf)
2023-2024	Final exam (retake)	(pdf)	(pdf)
2024-2025	Midterm exam	(pdf)	(pdf)
2024-2025	Midterm exam (retake)	(pdf)	(pdf)
2024-2025	Final exam	(pdf), (data)	(pdf)

Previous exercise problems & solutions

These are problems of previous years' exercise sessions.

Year	Topic	Questions	Solutions
2023-2024	Lecture 4: arrays	Arrays (pdf),
2023-2024	Lecture 4: simple plots	Plots (pdf)
2023-2024	Lecture 5: functions	(pdf)
2023-2024	Lecture 6: I/O and error-handling	(pdf)
2023-2024	Lecture 7: Modules	(pdf)
2023-2024	Lecture 8: Numpy arrays	(pdf)