Technical Foundations of Informatics
October 24, 2024
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.
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.