Other Python literature

Here we give some hints to literature on Python which can serve as complementary sources or as texts for parallel reading. Most introductory books on Python are devoted to teach this language as a general purpose tool. One excellent example which we want to mention here explicitly is [19]. It explains the language by simple examples, e.g. object oriented programming is explained by organizing a pizza bakery.

There are very few books dedicated to Python directed towards scientific computing and engineering. Among these few books we would like to mention the two books by Langtangen which combine scientific computing with the modern "pythonic" view on programming, [16,17].

This "pythonic" view is also the guiding line of our way of teaching programming of numerical algorithms. We try to show how many well-established concepts and constructions in computer science can be applied to problems within scientific computing. The pizza-bakery example is replaced by Lagrange polynomials, generators become time stepping methods for ODEs, and so on.

Finally we have to mention the nearly infinite amount of literature on the web. The web was also a big source of knowledge when preparing this book. Literature from the web often covers things that are new, but can also be totally outdated. The web also presents solutions and interpretations which might contradict each other. We strongly recommend to use the web as additional source, but we consider a "traditional" textbook with the web resources "edited" as the better entry point to a rich new world.