Python is a flexible scripting language suited to a wide range of programming tasks. Python is extremely popular and there exist many add-on packages that provide additional functionality.

Obtaining Python

Python is freely available. Mac OS and most Linux distributions include packages for Python in their package management system.  For windows, the Python(x,y) distribution provides a basic python installation, the spyder editor and many common add-on packages for scientific computing.

Getting Started

There are a large number of tutorials and guides freely available on the web, as well as many published books.

The tutorial at the python site is a good place to begin learning python.

There are many excellent books – the texts

• Lutz, M., 2011. Programming Python, O’Reilly Media.
• Martelli, A., Ravenscroft, A. & Ascher, D., 2005. Python Cookbook, O’Reilly Media

are good general references, while

• Langtangen, H.P., 2009. A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python (Texts in Computational Science and Engineering), Springer

has a more scientific focus.

Packages

There are a large number of add-on packages that provide additional functionality for Python.  Three particularly relevant packages are numpy, matplotlib and scipy, which are described at scipy.org.