How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Interactive Edition

This project began with the original How to Think Like a Computer Scientist text by Jeffrey Elkner, Peter Wentworth, Allen B. Downey, Chris Meyers, and Dario Mitchell. Since 2011 Brad Miller, David Ranum, Barbara Ericson, Mark Guzdial, and many others have built on the text making it interactive.

Programming is not a "spectator sport". It is something you do, something you participate in. It would make sense, then, that the book you use to learn programming should allow you to be active. That is our goal.

This book is meant to provide you with an interactive experience as you learn to program in Python. You can read the text, watch videos, and write and execute Python code. In addition to simply executing code, there is a unique feature called 'codelens' that allows you to control the flow of execution in order to gain a better understanding of how the program works..

Getting Started

We have tried to make it as easy as possible for you to build and use this book.

1. You can see and read this book online at interactivepython.org

2. You can build it and host it yourself in just a few simple steps:

   1. pipenv --python 2.7
   2. pipenv install -- Should install everything you need
   3. pipenv run runestone build -- will build the html and put it in ./build/thinkcspy
   4. pipenv run runestone serve -- will start a webserver and serve the pages locally from ./build/thinkcspy