Explorations in Computing ─ An Introduction to Computer Science and Python Programming

This text helps beginners develop their own Python programs. Experiments with fully completed programs are provided at the beginning of each chapter, allowing instructors to use the text in CS0 courses where students do not learn programming. Programming projects appear later in each chapter. Students are encouraged either to write the code that implements the functions introduced earlier or extend the existing programs. All the projects push students to explore further on their own.

John S. Conery is a professor in the Department of Biology and the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Oregon, where he teaches computer science courses and is developing introductory programming courses for biology majors. As a professor of computer and information science, he taught introductory computer science courses as well as courses on high performance computing and computational science. His research in bioinformatics and computational biology spans a number of areas related to gene and genome duplication, artificial neural networks, population modeling, and systems biology. He received a Ph.D. in computer science.