This page concerns the course Introduction to computer programming using Python, based on the course developed at Imperial College, and delivered at the University of Bari in June 2016.

Workshop files

The course consists of a series of self-learnng interactve tutorials in the form of Jupyter notebooks (previously known as IPython notebooks).

Download th file to your computer (unzip the file if it presents itself as a zip archive). Start the Jupyter notebook which will open on a web browser window (best results with Google Chrome); navigate to the directory where you saved the notebook file; open it from the dahsboard in the browser window and you are read to go.

Installing python

You can run the tutorials for this course on your own computer by installing a scientific python distribution. The Anaconda distribution provides a very convenient way of installing a python environment. It is free software, and it is available for Windoes, Mac OS and Linux. (For this course you will want to install version 3.x).

Some python resources

Imperial College Chemistry Department scientific computing courses

At the Chemistry Department of Imperial Colege a number of course on the general topic of scientific computing have been developed using Jupyter notebooks and python as a base language.

Python for data analysis and vizualisation: A course focussing on plotting, data analysis, fitting, making use of python's scientific libraries.
Introduction to computer programming using python: A slightly longer version of the current course, upon which it was based.
Introduction to object-oriented programming in python: A brief introduction to object-oriented programming in python. Development of a simple 2D hard disks simulation program.

Books and internet ressources

You will find many, many resources about python on the internet. Here are just a few pointers.

Getting some practice

The Project Euler provides some computationl challanges that can be solved by writing small computer programs. The challanges gradually become more difficult, and you need to think of the best approach to solve the problem.

Code Academy has a popular interactive online course on python.