About IST256

IST256 is an introductory programming course taught in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse university https://ischool.syr.edu. Programming is taught from the information sciences perspective with more emphasis on data-oriented applications such as text processing, data munging/analysis, Web API consumption, and visualization and less on computation. Students learn the Python https://www.python.org/ programming language and are expected to write code in the Jupyter https://jupyter.org Notebook interface. Python and Jupyter are common tools in data science today.

The course uses a hosted Jupyterhub cluster https://zero-to-jupyterhub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ for its programming environment. To code, students only need a web browser. The cluster runs on kubernetes and consists of 6 virtual machines with 8 threads and 64GB ram each. The cluster can support 100’s of concurrent users and can be scaled to support more as the need arises.

This website is a Github page, the source can be found here. https://github.com/IST256/IST256.github.io. The latest code repository of student assignments, labs, homework, class slides and code examples are also on Github, here: https://github.com/IST256/spring2021. You are welcome to use the materials to take the course as an independent learner or as a foundation for teaching your own course in Python!

Best,

Michael Fudge
mafudge at syr dot edu

Many thanks to:

• Syracuse University ITS for providing the compute resources necessary to host the cluster https://its.syr.edu/.
• Charles Severance for his excellent book, “Python for Everybody” https://www.py4e.com/.
• Elliot Hauser for https://trinket.io.
• GitHub for hosting this website and the code repositories https://github.com.
• Nick Lyga for helping to get the kubernetes environment up and running https://nicklyga.me/.
• The 100’s of individuals in the Python and Jupyter communities!