# Python 101

As we have mentioned, each chapter is split into 4 sections:
demonstrations, practice (preparatory) exercises, regular exercises
and voluntary exercises. The demos are complete programs with
comments that should give you a quick introduction to using the
constructs that you will need in the actual exercises. The demos for
the first week are these:

 1. ‹list›    – using lists
 2. ‹tuple›   – lists, sort of, but immutable
 3. ‹dict›    – using dictionaries
 4. ‹str›     – using strings
 5. ‹fun›     – writing functions

Sometimes, there will be ‘elementary’ exercises: these are too
simple to be a real challenge, but they are perhaps good warm-up
exercises to get into the spirit of things. You might want to do
them before you move on to the practice exercises.

 1. ‹fibfib›  – iterated Fibonacci sequence

The second set of exercises are those that are meant to be solved
«before» the corresponding seminar. The first batch should be
submitted by «17th of September». The corresponding seminars are in
the week starting on 19th of September. Now for the exercises:

 1. ‹rpn›     – Reverse Polish Notation with lists
 2. ‹image›   – compute the image of a given function
 3. ‹ts3esc›  – escaping magic character sequences
 4. ‹alchemy› – transmute and mix inputs to reach a goal
 5. ‹chain›   – solving a word puzzle
 6. ‹cycles›  – a simple graph algorithm with dictionaries

The third section are so-called ‘regular’ exercises. Feel free to
solve them ahead of time if you like. Some of them will be done in
the seminar. When you are done (or get stuck), you can compare your
code to the example solutions in Section K near the end of the PDF,
or in the directory ‹sol› in the source bundle. The exercises are:

 1. ‹permute›   – compute digit permutations of numbers
 2. ‹rfence›    – the rail fence transposition cipher
 3. ‹life›      – the game of life
 4. ‹breadth›   – statistics about a tree
 5. ‹radix›     – radix sorting of strings
 6. ‹bipartite› – check whether an input graph is bipartite

The final set are voluntary exercises, which have sanity tests
bundled, but reference solutions are not provided. They are meant
for additional practice, especially when you revisit previous
chapters later in the semester.

 1. (this section is empty for now)