A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python (3rd Edition)

This book is Volume 6 of Springer's Texts in Computational Science and Engineering series. The author, Hans Petter Langtangen, is a professor of computer science at the University of Oslo and director of the Centre for Biomedical Computing at the Simula Research Laboratory, and has long worked on computational science and Python applications. Using an example- and problem-driven approach, the book guides readers with no programming background through an introduction to scientific computing with Python. The 3rd edition was revised and published in 2012; the main text runs about 798 pages and covers computing with formulas, loops and lists, functions and branching, input data and error handling, array computing and curve plotting, files, strings, and dictionaries, an introduction to classes, random numbers and simple games, and object-oriented programming. The book also includes technical appendices on sequences and difference equations, an introduction to discrete calculus, an introduction to differential equations, a complete differential equation project, programming of differential equations, debugging, and migrating from Python to compiled languages. Examples are drawn from mathematics, numerical calculus, statistics, physics, biology, and finance, and nearly every example comes with complete, runnable code. The book particularly emphasizes the contrast between "Matlab-style" procedural code and object-oriented code, showing that Python can serve as a substitute for Matlab in scientific computing. In the preface, the author states that readers need only high school mathematics, and that learning classical and modern single-variable calculus alongside the book is even better.