Introduction to computation and programming using python: with application to computational modeling and understanding data

The new edition of an introduction to the art of computational problem solving using Python.

This book introduces students with little or no prior programming experience to the art of computational problem solving using Python and various Python libraries, including numpy, matplotlib, random, pandas, and sklearn. It provides students with skills that will enable them to make productive use of computational techniques, including some of the tools and techniques of data science for using computation to model and interpret data as well as substantial material on machine learning.

The book is based on an MIT course and was developed for use not only in a conventional classroom but in a massive open online course (MOOC). It contains material suitable for a two-semester introductory computer science sequence.

This third edition has expanded the initial explanatory material, making it a gentler introduction to programming for the beginner, with more programming examples and many more “finger exercises.” A new chapter shows how to use the Pandas package for analyzing time series data. All the code has been rewritten to make it stylistically consistent with the PEP 8 standards. Although it covers such traditional topics as computational complexity and simple algorithms, the book focuses on a wide range of topics not found in most introductory texts, including information visualization, simulations to model randomness, computational techniques to understand data, and statistical techniques that inform (and misinform) as well as two related but relatively advanced topics: optimization problems and dynamic programming. The book also includes a Python 3 quick reference guide.

All of the code in the book and an errata sheet are available on the book's web page on the MIT Press website.