Computing With Python: An Introduction to Python for Science & Engineering

Abstract

This book is the outcome of a course on Python® for scientific computing which has been taught at Lund University since 2008. The course expanded over the years, and condensed versions of the material were taught at universities in Cologne, Trondheim, Stavanger, Soran and also in computational oriented companies. Our belief is that Python and its surrounding scientific computing ecosystem - SciPy, NumPy and matplotlib - represent tremendous progress in the scientific computing environment. Python and the aforementioned libraries are free and open source. What's more, Python is a modern language featuring all the bells and whistles that this adjective entails: object oriented programing, testing, advanced Python shell with IPython, etc. The typical reader of this book will already have some experience in programing, and some taste for scientific computing or mathematics. Our goal is to explain to those readers the steps to get started with Python in the context of scientific computing. The book may be read either from the first page to the last, or by picking the bits that seem most interesting. Needless to say, as improving one's programing skills requires considerable practice, it is highly advisable to experiment and play with the examples and the exercises in the book.