Scientific Scripting with Python 1.0


Category: Books
Price: $4.99 (iTunes)

Description:

'Scientific Scripting with Python' is a new book that is exclusively available on the iPhone. It teaches you how to automate your work using the popular Python scripting language.

Python is a simple, yet powerful, programming language similar to Perl, Tcl, and Ruby. It is heavily used in scientific research, and by companies like Google.

The book places a strong emphasis on practical techniques for handling data. Although targeted specifically at scientists and engineers, anyone that needs to perform automations involving data would find it useful.

Every effort has been made to make reading this text as comfortable as possible on the small iPhone screen. Text has been specially formatted to make it more readable, and pages have been made extra long, to avoid unnecessary breaks in source code examples.

An interactive table of contents has also been provided, making it easy to quickly move around in the book. This makes it suitable as a reference, even if you have no intention of reading it 'cover-to-cover'.

About the Author
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Dr. Drew McCormack has been developing scientific software for 15 years on systems ranging from desktop Macs to massively-parallel supercomputers. He is a board member of MacResearch.org, a web site for Mac-using scientists, and contributes regular articles on topics ranging from Mac and iPhone application development, to Python scripting and parallel programming.

Requirements
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Although this book assumes no prior knowledge of programming, some familiarity with the UNIX command line is required. Readers should be able to edit text files, and run commands in the terminal.

Table of Contents
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Preliminaries 5
- Python in Practice 5
- Installing Python 5
- Setting Up Your Environment 6
Basics 7
- What's a 'Scripting Language'? 7
- Introducing Python 8
- The Interpreter 8
- A First Script 10
- Indentation is Significant 12
- Comments 13
- Numerical Types 14
- Operators 15
- Variables 17
- Expressions 18
- Strings 19
- Functions, Objects, and Methods 21
- Conditional Branching 23
- Loops 24
- Lists 26
- Tuples 31
- List Comprehensions 33
- Dictionaries 35
Program Structure 39
- Functions 39
- Function Objects and Anonymous Functions 44
- Built-In Functions 45
- Modules and Packages 47
- Classes and Objects 49
- Methods 50
- Class and Instance Variables 51
- Inheritance 53
- Special Methods 55
- Object-Oriented Programming 57
Working with Files 59
- The File System 59
- Opening and Closing Files 65
- Reading and Writing Strings 66
- Navigating in Files 68
- Streams 70
- Parsing and Formatting Data 72
- The string module 72
- Regular Expressions 79
- eXtensible Markup Language (XML) 95
- Decision Chart for Parsing 101
Storing Data 102
- Printing 102
- Serialization 107
- XML 109
- Databases 113
- Hierarchical Data Files 118
Generating Data 123
- Running Processes 123
- Calculations with Numpy 128
- SciPy 133
Object-Oriented Programming 137
- Object-Oriented Programming and State Machines 137
- Encapsulation 139
- Interface and Implementation 143
- Association and Composition 144
- Inheritance 145
- Polymorphism 148
Final Project 152
Appendix: Frequencies Script 156

Scientific Scripting with Python



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