python programming this computer science text further develops the skills you learned in your first cs text or course and adds to your bag of tricks by teaching you how to use efficient algorithms for dealing with large amounts of data without the proper understanding of efficiencyit is possible to bring even the fastest computers to grinding halt when working with large data sets this has happened beforeand soon you will understand just how easy it can occur but firstwe'll review some patterns for programming and look at the python programming language to make sure you understand the basic structure and syntax of the language to begin writing programs using python you need to install python on your computer the examples in this text use python python is not compatible with python so you'll want to be sure you have python or later installed on your computer when writing programs in any language good integrated development environment (ideis valuable tool so you'll want to install an idetoo examples within this text will use wing ide as pictured in fig although other acceptable ides are available as well the wing ide is well maintainedsimple to useand has nice debugger which will be useful as you write python programs if you want to get wing ide then go to ~leekent/cs has directions for installing both python and wing ide wing ide is the free version of wing for educational use there are some general concepts about python that you should know when reading the text python is an interpreted language that means that you don' have to go through any extra steps after writing python code before you can run it you can simply press the debug button in the wing ide (it looks like an insectand it will ask you to save your program if you haven' already done so at least once then it will run your program python is also dynamically typed this means that you will not get any type errors before you run your program as you would with some programming languages it is especially important for you to understand the types of data you are using in your program more on this in just bit finallyyour python programs are interpreted by the python interpreter the shell is another name for the python interpreter and wing ide gives you access to shell within the ide (cspringer international publishing switzerland lee and hubbarddata structures and algorithms with pythonundergraduate topics in computer sciencedoi -- this copy belongs to 'acha