In recent years, information technology (IT) has transformed the way people do commerce and business. Some obvious examples are online channels, digital marketing, automatic replenishment, program trading, display advertisement, social networking sites, business analytics, just to name a few. Understanding the capability of IT obviously brings in huge advantage to a business decision maker: Either you do it by yourself when you are junior, or you know who are the right people to delegate to when you are senior. Being able to communicate with (or even lead) IT people is also critical.

In this course, we will introduce how to write computer programs for business computing. We cannot make you a software engineer, who build software products to sell to consumers. Instead, we plan to enable you to write programs to facilitate your own works (e.g., analyze a huge data set that cannot be done with MS Excel). More importantly, you will know how a computer program works, the ways computer scientists and software engineers think, and how to leverage IT to bring in competitive advantages to your organization and yourself.

The programming language we will introduce is Python, one of the most popular and powerful high-level programming language nowadays. The language Python is just something that facilitates the delivery of the principles of computer programming. What really matter are the conceptual principles, not the syntax or rules. Our objective is not to teach you how to write Python programs; we want to make you be able to learn other programming languages (like R, SAS, Javascript, etc.) in the future.

This is an elective course for everyone. If too many students want to take this course, students in the college of management has the highest priority. We do not assume any background in computer programming, and there is no prerequisite for this course. Auditing is welcome if and only if the classroom is not full. This course is taught in Chinese.

Note. To accommodate as many students as possible (and improve the learning quality), in this semester many lectures will be given in online videos made by the instructors. Please pay attention to the related notes in the syllabus.

For a detailed description about this course, including course policies, grading rules, tentative schedules, etc., please see the syllabus. Whenever there is an update, a new version will be posted with a short note describing the update.