Madhavan Mukund

Programming and Data Structures with Python

Aug–Nov 2025

Administrative details

• Instructor: Madhavan Mukund

• Teaching Assistants: Arnab Bera, Ashwin Bhaskar, Vardhan Kumar Ray

• Evaluation:

  • Quizzes, programming assignments, final exam

  • Weightage approximately 10%, 50%, 40%, to be confirmed

  • Copying is fatal

• Text and reference books:

  • We will not be following any specific text book. There are plenty of resources online. You can find a list of books at the following link: PythonBooks

  • The official Python tutorial is a good place to start learning Python if you already have some programming background.

Course plan

This list is approximate and subject to change.

• Programming in Python

  • Names, values, control flow
  • Lists, dictionaries, strings
  • Exception handling, input/output and files
  • Basics of object-oriented programming

• Data structures and algorithmic techniques

  • Searching and sorting
  • Quantifying efficiency
  • Loop invariants
  • Stacks, queues, priority queues, heaps
  • Backtracking
  • Balanced search trees
  • Dynamic programming

• Python for data science

  • Processing data from tables, displaying charts and graphs
  • numpy, pandas and matplotlib libraries

Assignments

• TBA

Practice Assignments

• TBA

Lectures

• Lecture 1: 07 Aug 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Lecture Notes (pdf))

  Introduction to algorithms and programming

  Examples: IPL data – variables, iteration, lists, tuples, dictionaries

• Lecture 2: 12 Aug 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code ( Jupyter notebook, pdf), IPL 2024 spreadsheet)

  Python code for questions about IPL data

• Lecture 3: 14 Aug 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Basic Python –- Data types: numbers (int and float) and operations, booleans, range(), iteration, math library