Description

The typical reader of the book will be a student of mathematics, physics, chemistry, or other natural science, and many of the examples will be familiar to these readers. However, the rapidly increasing relevance of data science means that computations and scientific programming will be of interest to a growing group of users. No typical data science tools are presented in this book, but the reader will learn tasks such as reading data from files, simple text processing, and programming with mathematics and floating point computations. These are all fundamental building blocks of any data science application, and they are essential to know before diving into more advanced and specialized tools.
No prior knowledge of programming is needed to read this book. We start with some very simple examples to get started with programming and then move on to introduce fundamental programming concepts such as loops, functions, if-tests, lists, and classes. These generic concepts are supplemented by more specific and practical tools for scientific programming, primarily plotting and array-based computations. The book’s overall purpose is to introduce the reader to programming and, in particular, to demonstrate how programming can be an extremely useful and powerful tool in many branches
of the natural sciences.