New introduction to SciPy

The Python stack for scientific computing is more modular than say R or Mathematica. Python is a general-purpose programming language that has libraries for scientific computing. R and Mathematica are statistical and mathematical programming languages that have general-purpose features. The Python approach has its advantages — I’d rather do math in a general language than do general programming in a mathematical language — but it takes longer to learn. The components of the Python stack work well together, but someone new to Python has to discover what components they’ll need.

Several books have come out recently to help someone learn Python and the components for numerical computing. The latest is Learning SciPy for Numerical and Scientific Computing [link rot] by Francisco J. Blanco-Silva.

This book covers the things you’d expect, including SciPy, NumPy, and Matplotlib. The only exception may be IPython. But no book can cover everything. And since IPython is an environment more than a library, it makes some sense to leave it out.

In addition to the usual topics, the book includes several important topics that are not as commonly covered. For example, it devotes a good amount of space to special functions and integration in a chapter on numerical analysis. I share the author’s assessment that this is “one of the most interesting chapters in the book.”

There are three chapters on more specific applications: signal processing, data mining, and computational geometry. These chapters give an introduction to their topics as well as how to carry out computations in SciPy.

The final chapter of the book is on integration with other programming languages.

Learning SciPy for Numerical and Scientific Computing covers the material you need to get going. It’s easy to read, and still fairly small: 150 pages total, about 130 pages of content. This is the right size for such a book in my opinion. There’s plenty of online documentation for more details, but it helps to have a good overview such as this book before diving into reference material.