Madhavan Mukund

Programming and Data Structures with Python

Aug–Nov 2026

Administrative details

• Instructor: Madhavan Mukund

• Teaching Assistants: Sombit Mazumder, 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, 29 September 2026, due 5 October 2026 ( pdf, Python code)

• Assignment 2, 19 October 2026, due 26 October 2026 ( pdf, List.py)

Lectures

• Lecture 1: 04 Aug 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Lecture Notes (pdf))

  Introduction to algorithms and programming

  Examples: FIFA World Cup 2026 data – variables, iteration, lists, tuples, dictionaries

• Lecture 2: 6 Aug 2026
  (Lecture Notes (pdf), Python code ( Jupyter notebook, pdf), FIFA World Cup 2026 spreadsheet)

  Python code for questions about FIFA World Cup 2026 data

• Lecture 3: 18 Aug 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

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

• Lecture 4: 20 Aug 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Basic Python – while loops, booleans, variables/values/types, if-elif-else, lists, slices, range with step

• Lecture 5: 25 Aug 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Basic Python – list functions - append, insert, extend, sort, … tuples, dictionaries, hashing

• Lecture 6: 27 Aug 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

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

• Lecture 7: 1 Sep 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Basic Python – nested collections, mutable and immutable values, passing mutable values to functions, None

• Lecture 8: 3 Sep 2026
  (Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Basic Python – strings, map and filter

  Quiz 1, Solutions.

• Lecture 9: 8 Sep 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Basic Python – list comprehension, local and global scope, static vs dynamic scoping

• Lecture 10: 10 Sep 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Arrays vs lists; experiments to understand how Python represents lists

  Quiz 2, Solutions.

• Lecture 11: 15 Sep 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Experiments to understand how Python handles keys in dictionaries

  Inductive definitions and recursive functions

• Lecture 12: 17 Sep 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Setting the recursion limit in Python

  Dictionary implementation of lists: recursive functions for append, length, sum, delete

• Lecture 13: 29 Sep 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Functions with default arguments.

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

• Lecture 14: 6 Oct 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

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

• Lecture 15: 8 Oct 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf))

  Object-oriented programming: building a linked list

  Input, output, exception handling

• Lecture 16: 13 Oct 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Python code (Jupyter notebook, pdf, sample text file, )

  Exception handling, raising exceptions

  String formatting

  Input/output: Reading and writing files, stripping whitespace

• Lecture 17: 15 Oct 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Lecture Notes ([Jupyter notebook], [pdf]))

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

• Lecture 18: 20 Oct 2026
  (Class Notes (pdf), Lecture Notes ([Jupyter notebook], [pdf], [sample csv files]) )

  Pandas: series, data frames, reading csv files, descriptive statistics