An Introduction to Python For Undergraduate Engineers

Authors
Matthew Johnson

Dut Andrew Kulang

Getting Started

 * /What Is This Wikibook About?/
 * /Installing Python/
 * /Running Python/
 * /Getting Started/

Lessons

 * /Python as a Calculator/
 * /Numeric Data Types/
 * /Getting Inputs/
 * /Reading/Writing to Files/

Conditional Programming

 * /If/Else/
 * /For Loops/
 * /While Loops/
 * /Boolean Logic/

Functions

 * /Functions/

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

Wikibooks

 * Non-Programmer's Tutorial for Python 2.6
 * Non-Programmer's Tutorial for Python 3

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.''