Djabeur Mohamed Seifeddine Zekrifa

Introduction to Python Djabeur Mohamed Seifeddine Zekrifa

practical introduction to technical programming in Python. It grew out ofnotes I developed for various undergraduate computer engineering coursesI taught at NYU and CHIU. While it has evolved considerably since I firstput pen to paper, it retains its original purpose: to get students with noprevi-ous programming experience writing and running Python programsfor scientific applications with a minimum of fuss. The approach is pedagogical and "bottom up," which means start-ingwith examples and extracting more general principles from thatexperience. This is in contrast to presenting the general principles firstand then examples of how those general principles work. In my experience, the latter approach is satisfying only to the instructor. Much computerdocumentation takes a top-down approach, which is one of the reasonsit's frequently diÿcult to read and understand. On the other hand, onceexamples have been seen, it's useful to ex-tract the general ideas in orderto develop the conceptual framework needed for further applications.