Python for Programmers: Reference

Python can be used in several different modes.

The Jupyter notebook provides an environment for performing computations and also for communicating about them

Variables are labels attached to values that are stored in the computer memory

You can perform operations on variables using operators and functions

Objects have functions attached to them – methods

Python contains several built-in collection types

Numpy extends these with an array type

Repeating operations over items of a collection makes sense

Both for and while loops can be used to repeat operations in different cases

Logical operations can be instantiated using selection

Flexible data analysis grows out of thats

Writing functions allows us to modularize our code and reuse it

DRY – Don’t repeat yourself

Matplotlib is a library for 2D publication-quality scientific visualization

MPL makes easy plots easy, and harder visualization possible.