About 9 months ago, I had signed on to do undergraduate research in astronomy which my professor told me was going to be "heavily Python based". I had NO previous programming experience. Perusing Amazon for some Python resources, I came across this book which, upon reading the back cover, was written by a physicist, so I thought this would be a good fit for me (I'm a physics major) -- and I wasn't wrong.
In the first few chapters, Hill will teach you the essentials of the Python language, including a little interlude about making plots with Pylab in Chapter 3. Throughout the rest of the book, you will learn how to use a few Python libraries which are instrumental in science work like Numpy, Matplotlib, and SciPy. In each of these chapters there are plenty of examples with all the code needed to try them for yourself. Appendix A contains solutions for the exercises at the end of the chapters (and not just every odd-numbered exercise). One quality-of-life feature that I like about this book is the index which lists page numbers for the methods used in the Python libraries (e.g. fig.addsubplot(), np.genfromtxt(), etc.).
In my undergrad astronomy research, I was tasked to write a Python program which could read-in a few thousand astronomical images of a black hole X-ray binary (using the Numpy method np.genfromtxt() which is covered in this book), turn them into data that Python could read, and produce plots using all that data. During one of our observing runs, our campus observatory telescope was malfunctioning (the telescope wasn't tracking properly) and I was tasked to extract specific bits of data contained in the astronomical images (FITS file header), generate plots using that data to help both us and the telescope engineer understand the problem. This book was helpful to me in all of those cases.
This book isn't an all-encompassing book on everything one could do with Python, however. (You won't be learning about machine learning and building a neural network in this book, for example). But if you're in the sciences like me, and want to learn Python in the context of science, this would be a useful resource for you as it was to me.
ISBN-13: 978-1107428225
ISBN-10: 110742822X
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Top reviews from other countries
Martin
An excellent introduction to Python for scientists
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 26, 2020EJ
Handy Guide to Scientific Programming with Python 3
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 24, 2016Konichiwakitty
Great book with clear explanations and examples
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 5, 2017Amazon Customer
but this is probably the best book to start with
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 27, 2017Joseph A. Wright
A great introduction
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 18, 2021
