Authors
Matthew Johnson
Getting Started
Lessons
Conditional Programming
Functions
Simple Graphics using EasyGui
Mathematics In Python
There are two main additional modules that enable us to use Python as a very sophisticated environment for dealing with algebra and numerical problems, these are the built in 'math' module and an additional module 'sympy', which can be downloaded from the internet (see the 'Getting Additional Modules' section at the end).
Remember that to use a module we must first import it using the import command, for example:
from sympy import *
- Symbolic Algebra
- Differentiation
- Integration
- Matrices
Getting Additional Modules
EasyGui Sympy
Recommended Reading
Wikibooks
Textbooks
Computer Science: The Python Programming Language, Miller & Ranum, Jones & Bartlett Publishers, ISBN 0-7637-4316-X
This is a good, quick way to get into the basics, but won't really give you much more detail than this wiki.
Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science, John Zelle, Franklin Beedle & Associates, ISBN 1-887902-99-6
This is a more thorough book that covers more detail, however it is written as a way of learning computer science using Python as a starting language and so may not directly relate to programming in engineering. Nevertheless if software design is closer to your interests/needs then this might be the book for you.
References
The following references have helped the author(s) to learn python and are recommended for study if you wish to pursue python further. This wikibook is intended only as a short course to get you started with python. There is much more you can learn and a great deal more that you can do with it! Good luck!