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

• Assignment 1, 6 September 2025, due 12 September 2025 ( Jupyter notebook, pdf)

• Assignment 2, 2 October 2025, due 9 October 12 October 2025

• Assignment 3, List.py, 17 October 2025, due 24 October 2025

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

• Lecture 4: 19 Aug 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Basic Python – functions, while loops, booleans, variables/values/types

• Lecture 5: 21 Aug 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Basic Python – if-elif-else, lists, slices, range with step, list functions - append, insert, extend, sort, …

• Lecture 6: 26 Aug 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Basic Python – tuples, dictionaries, hashing

• Lecture 7: 28 Aug 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Basic Python – lists vs dictionaries: unique elements, list intersection

• Lecture 8: 2 Sep 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Basic Python – nested collections, strings

• Lecture 9: 4 Sep 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Basic Python – map, filter, list comprehension, mutable and immutable values

• Lecture 10: 9 Sep 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Basic Python – mutable and immutable values, None, passing mutable values to functions, dictionary keys must be immutable

• Lecture 11: 11 Sep 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Scope and lifetime, local and global scope, static vs dynamic scoping, arrays vs lists

• Lecture 12: 16 Sep 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Arrays, lists, dictionaries; experiments to measure performance; implementing a list using nested dictionaries

• Lecture 13: 18 Sep 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Inductive definitions and recursive functions, recursion depth

  Quiz 1, Solutions.

• Lecture 14: 23 Sep 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Abstract datatypes, object-oriented programming: classes, objects, special functions

• Lecture 15: 25 Sep 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Object-oriented programming: changing the implementation, building a linked list

• Lecture 16: 09 Oct 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf), Lecture recording) )

  Linked lists: recursive append and delete

  Exception handling

• Lecture 17: 14 Oct 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Lecture Notes ([Jupyter notebook], [pdf]), Sample text file oz.txt) )

  Input/output: String formatting, modifying behaviour of print(), Reading and writing files, stripping whitespace

• Lecture 18: 16 Oct 2025
  (Class Notes (pdf), Lecture Notes ([Jupyter notebook], [pdf]))

  Numpy: Creating arrays, stacking and splitting, axes, matrix operations, reshaping, copies and views, broadcasting