Python for Science

Wellcome to the world of computer programming. If you prefer to know about computer programming in a broader sense, read the section The Joys of the Craft from the book titled ‘The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.’

The focus of this course is exploring Python as a tool for learning science. The course covers the basic Python language, NumPy and Matplotlib in ten days, with one class having a duration of 1.5 hours every day. The book followed is given below along with the example programs.

Download the book in PDF format.

Download the Example Programs

The course is conducted online using Bigbluebutton, an open source web conferencing tool, explained in the Video instruction for Online class. This video also explains how to practice Python on a browser, but we decided not to use it during the class to avoid the extra load on the network.

It is advisable to have a GNU/Linux system installed on your computer. For beginners Ubuntu may be a good choice. During the course we will be using the ‘geany’ IDE. The video below explains howto configure it to print the program output in the built-in terminal, something convenient while sharing windows using Bigblubutton. Creating a file and saving it with a .py extension configures the build commands of ‘geany’. You should change the default setting of ‘python’ to ‘python3’ from the ‘Build->Set Build Commands’ menu. Video on Configuring Geany

Those who are using MSWindows may follow the instruction is the video Install Python on Windows, to install Python3 and the required modules on their computer.

Review of First two classes

Python Challenges

Tutorial Videos to learn Python

Python4schools by Ajith Kumar

From FreeCodeCamp Python for Beginners by Mosh

There are many more on Youtube.