The next course in Computer Science is Comp 401 wherein you will learn Java. You already know how to program so learning Java will mostly be a matter of learning the way to say things in that language. Here is a brief example so we can talk about the key differences.

public class FindLargestSmallestNumber {
 
    public static void main(String[] args) {
 
        //array of 10 numbers
        int numbers[] = new int[]{32,43,53,54,32,65,63,98,43,23};
 
        //assign first element of an array to largest and smallest
        int smallest = numbers[0];
        int largest = numbers[0];
 
        for(int i=1; i< numbers.length; i++)
        {
            if(numbers[i] > largest)
                largest = numbers[i];
            else if (numbers[i] < smallest)
                smallest = numbers[i];
 
        }
 
        System.out.println("Largest Number is : " + largest);
        System.out.println("Smallest Number is : " + smallest);
    }
}
 
/*
Output of this program would be
Largest Number is : 98
Smallest Number is : 23
*/

In Python using numpy we could write it this way.

import numpy as np

numbers = np.array([32,43,53,54,32,65,63,98,43,23])

print 'Largest Number is :", numbers.max()
print 'Smallest Number is :", numbers.min()

That seems almost like cheating because its so easy. So let's look at the parallel example in pure Python.

numbers = [32,43,53,54,32,65,63,98,43,23]

smallest = numbers[0]
largest = numbers[0]

for number in numbers[1:]:
    if number < smallest:
        smallest = number;
    if number > largest:
        largest = number

print 'Largest Number is :", largest
print 'Smallest Number is :", smallest