Technical Foundations of Informatics
January 02, 2025
About the Book
This book covers the foundation skills necessary to start writing computer programs to work with data using modern and reproducible techniques. It requires little or no technical background. These materials are developed for the INFO 201: Technical Foundations of Informatics course taught at the University of Washington Information School; however they have been structured to be an online resource for anyone who is interested to learn to work with data using programming languages.
The book contains a number of exercises, mostly with solutions. It is strongly recommended that you solve the exercises when you read the chapters–coding is heavy of different tools and concepts, and learning to use the tools and to think in those concepts requires a lot of practice. The exercises will offer some of such practice.
The book is largerly focused on programming–a lot of working with data is done through coding. We think that even in the age of AI, the need for classical computer programming is not going away any time soon. This is because computer programming is much more precise. You program is an excellent and precise documentation of what kind of data processing you are doing. AI tools are different. AI can take human language input, but unfortunately, human language is very vague, and what you asked the AI to do is not at all a good explanation of what exactly was done.
Besides programming, the book also provides conceptual knowledge, for instance about choice of variable names, or what is reshaping of data frames. Such topics are sometimes accompanied with hand-drawn figures. This is a deliberate choice, to stress that the concepts we discuss there are more general than computer code.
In 2019, a branch of this book was published as Programming Skills for Data Science by Safari Books. It is available through SafariBooksOnline or Amazon.
This version of the book is currently maintained by Ott Toomet. Its sources are in Bitbucket, in repo otoomet/info201-book, the compiled web version is on my UW webpage.
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License. The
images are under the same license, unless marked otherwise.