Introduction to Computational Thinking

Learn approaches of computational thinking and the art of designing algorithms. Most of the algorithms you will see in this book are used in almost all software that runs on your computer.

Learning how to program can be very rewarding. It is a special feeling to seeing a computer translate your thoughts into actions and see it solve your problems for you. To get to that point, however, you must learn to think about computations in a new way—you must learn computational thinking.

This book begins by discussing models of the world and how to formalize problems. This leads onto a definition of computational thinking and putting computational thinking in a broader context. The practical coding in the book is carried out in Python; you’ll get an introduction to Python programming, including how to set up your development environment.

You will:
Think in a computational wayAcquire general techniques for problem solvingSee general and concretealgorithmic techniquesProgram solutions that are both computationally efficient and maintainable