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

• TBA

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