GCSE Computer Science NEA Programming Guide: Python Edition

Students learning to program are first taught some simple constructs in the language; ‘for’ loops, ‘if ... then’ statements and the like. Understanding these is quite straightforward, but turning these language constructs into effective and effcient solutions of real world problems is quite another matter.

This book takes three GCSE sample tasks provided by one of the examination boards and guides the student slowly and carefully through the sort of approach and thinking that is required to convert ideas into pseudo code and then into working code.

This book is relatively easy to read but it is not an easy book. Learning to write code is hard and there is no ‘royal road’ to programming. We have written the book in a conversational style but following us from first thoughts, through development to the solution of each of these problems will require time and concentrated effort on the part of the student.

Although written specifically to help GCSE students come to grips with their first programming task, we hope that this book might help anyone looking to improve their skills.

All of the source code and relevant data files are available for download from github.