Learn to Program: Online course to teach you how to become a programmer using Python – Starting August

Do you want to learn how to program? Programmers make the web go round. You wouldn’t be reading this page or have a website like Google or Facebook to surf without the genius of programmers. Here is an opportunity for you to learn how to program, starting from the fundamentals.

This University of Toronto, through Coursera will be offering a free online course – Learn to Program, starting August 19^th, to teach you the fundamental building blocks of programming and how to write fun and useful programs using Python Language.

Watch the Introductory Video

Start Date

The 7 weeks long course will start on August 19th 2013

Who the course is for?

This course is intended for people who have never seen a computer program. It will give you a better understanding of how computer applications work and teach you how to write your own applications. More importantly, you’ll start to learn computational thinking, which is a fundamental approach to solving real-world problems.

Computer programming languages share common fundamental concepts, and this course will introduce you to those concepts using the Python programming language. By the end of this course, you will be able to write your own programs to process data from the web and create interactive text-based games.

Recommended Background

This course is intended for people who have never programmed before.  Knowledge of grade school mathematics is necessary: you need to be comfortable with simple mathematical equations, including operator precedence. You should also be comfortable working with simple functions, such as f(x) = x + 5.

Course Format

The class consists of 1 to 2 hours of lecture each week, which are made up of videos that are generally shorter than 10 minutes each. Each video contains integrated quiz questions. There are also weekly standalone exercises that are not part of the video lectures and a (non-optional) final exam.

To learn more about this course and to sign up visit the Program webpage

The course will start on Aug 19th 2013 and you will be notified if you sign up, just before then to remind you when class will begin.

If you have basic background knowledge of Python and object-oriented programming (OOC) and want to see how the language can be used for web-specific projects, take this course on Web Programming with Python.