From the reviews: Langtangen ... does an excellent job of introducing programming as a set of skills in problem solving. He guides the reader into thinking properly about producing program logic and data structures for modeling real-world problems using objects and functions and embracing the object-oriented paradigm. ... Summing Up: Highly recommended.
F. H. Wild III, Choice, Vol. 47 (8), April 2010
Those of us who have learned scientific programming in Python ‘on the streets’ could be a little jealous of students who have the opportunity to take a course out of Langtangen’s Primer.”
John D. Cook, The Mathematical Association of America, September 2011
This book goes through Python in particular, and programming in general, via tasks that scientists will likely perform. It contains valuable information for students new to scientific computing and would be the perfect bridge between an introduction to programming and an advanced course on numerical methods or computational science.
Alex Small, IEEE, CiSE Vol. 14 (2), March /April 2012
“This fourth edition is a wonderful, inclusive textbook that covers pretty much everything one needs to know to go from zero to fairly sophisticated scientific programming in Python...”
Joan Horvath, Computing Reviews, March 2015
Hans Petter Langtangen is a professor of computer science at the University of Oslo. He has formerly been a professor of mechanics and is now the director of a Norwegian Center of Excellence: "Center for Biomedical Computing", at Simula Research Laboratory. Langtangen has published over 100 scientific publications and written several books, including papers and the bestseller TCSE 6 "A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python", now in its 5th edition. He has also developed open source and commercial software systems for computational sciences.