concept flowchart in category python
This is an excerpt from Manning's book Get Programming: Learn to code with Python.
Following flowcharts—You won’t need to know flowcharts to understand this book, but understanding them requires the same skills as understanding basic programming. Other ideas that use the same skill set are playing the game of 20 Questions, following a recipe, reading a choose-your-own-adventure book, or understanding algorithms. You should be familiar with following a set of instructions and making branching decisions. Flowcharts show a list of instructions that flow from one to the next and allow you to make decisions, which lead to different paths. In a flowchart, you’re asked a series of questions, whose answer is one of two choices: yes or no. Depending on your answer, you follow certain paths through the flowchart and will eventually end up at a final answer. Figure 1.1 is an example of a flowchart.
When you read a recipe, the sequence of steps is likely outlined in words. To prepare you for understanding how to be a programmer, you should start to think about visualizing recipes with flowcharts, as discussed briefly in lesson 1. Figure 2.2 shows how to represent baking bread with a flowchart. In this scenario, you’re using a bread machine, and the ingredients differ slightly than the ones shown in figure 2.1. In the flowchart, steps are entered in rectangular boxes. If a recipe allows for a possible substitution, represent that with a diamond box. If a recipe has you repeating a task, draw an arrow going back up to the first step in the repeated sequence.