D520 Week One

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:00:55 +1200

As promised, here’s my material from the first week of “D520: Programming” (in IronPython). I gave the students [PDF] (and [zip]), [PDF], and [PDF]. The notes have four sections (this pattern will continue): which chapters of the textbook are covered this week (and a couple of sentences that summarise them or point out which parts are important to us), the tools that are required this week (since this is the first week, this section is large, covering installation of Adobe Reader, IronPython itself (including putting it on the PATH), and several IDEs (as previously covered), including configuration), key points, and example code (the examples that I plan to use in class). For anyone interested (chiefly: me in about nine months time, when I’m planning the 2010 course), here’s a summary of the first week. It’s rather long (2100+ words) - the summaries of future weeks should be shorter.The students seemed fine with the choice of textbook, and that there was one. I expected more grumbling about the price, but perhaps they just kept that to themselves. There did seem to be a moderate amount of interest in the ebook version over the print copy. The real test of the textbook starts next week, since none of the students were organised enough to buy the text before the first class, and so hadn’t seen it or read the first two chapters, which we covered. They are expected to have at least skimmed through Chapter 3 before next week’s class. The first part of the lesson was the mandatory-but-dull course introduction (who I am, what the assessment is, what they’ll be learning, and so forth), which went as normal. The second part was a small lecture about IronPython and .NET (roughly covering the material from Chapter 1 of the textbook, but improvised at the time). I doubt much of this will be accessed (I haven’t finalised the examination paper yet) - if anything perhaps just low-mark questions like “what is .NET”, “what is the Framework Class Library”, “explain what managed code is”, or “what is one advantage and one disadvantage of IronPython over CPython”. The first lesson of most modules is generally fairly light-weight - it helps those that miss the first class (more than you might think), and leaves room for addressing any problems that arise. I tried to emphasise the strengths of both .NET and IronPython, as well as reassure them that they would be using their existing skills, rather than starting from scratch (it’s possible I made too much of this: since they don’t know how difficult students in the previous two years found the Python->Visual Basic change, they may not have been expecting anything difficult). I imagine few students were interested in the history, but IMO it’s still worth including in the lecture. We then proceeded to tool installation and I did a few examples in the interactive console. There were a few IronPython-specific hiccups:

Summary on Tony Andrew Meyer

D520 Week One