Python: Beginner to Expert
John Lockwood 
If you’ve studied math and then learned to program, or if you’re a programmer studying math, you may have been amused (or perhaps confused) by the interesting language similarities and differences between the two fields. Vexed by Vectors Most of us first encounter geometric vectors in public school, as those interesting little arrows that include … Read more
In a recent article about SymPy, I included a section on SymPy vs. SciPy. In it, I made the claim that SciPy where I said that it has excellent support for functionality that overlaps SymPy. I also made the qualified prediction in the conclusion that “Although I also resolved to spend more time researching and … Read more
SymPy is a Python library for symbolic mathematics. It’s free and open source, and because it’s written entirely in Python, it’s easy to install and use. Symbolic math software tools, also called Computer Algebra Systems (CAS), allow you to work with mathematical equations more or less as you would on paper. For example, you can … Read more
If you ask developers about Python, those who love it may tell you that it’s a powerful, object-oriented, multi-purpose language. They’ll also say it supports many use cases, including back support for back-end web development, data science, cloud programming, and more. On the other hand, those who hate it may tell you it’s “just a … Read more
Introduction Using VS Code as a Python IDE has many advantages. It is faster than PyCharm, and it is also a great general editor. That means you can use the same editor and keyboard shortcuts for Python as you use to edit your Bash scripts, JavaScript, and whatever else you may need to do. Unlike … Read more
If you have had a bad experience with math, you may already be discouraged about your ability to learn it. However, since you’re reading this and I’m writing it, let’s assume we both have some interest in the topic, and from that solid basis, let us both be encouraged. Alright, we both have an interest, … Read more
If you’re an experienced programmer who started in Python, you’re probably at least familiar with the basic uses of the with statement. The with statement in Python is an elegant way to manage resources, and is most famously implemented by Python’s open function. Here’s a simple example that prints its own contents and exits. Again, … Read more
This is an article about Git and GitHub, in which we’ll also tell a story about a dinosaur and his yellow floppy disks. We begin with Git and GitHub, lest we get too interested in the story and forget the real subject of this article. Git and GitHub are critical tools to know. For example, … Read more
Almost all Python developers encounter indexing early on when they learn about lists. As you probably already know, Python lists have zero-based indexes. That is to say, given a list named movies, for example, movies[0] returns the first element in the ist, while movies[len(movies)-1] returns the last element. So far, there’s nothing to see here, … Read more
In my recent article Introducing SageMath: Symbolic Math Software in Python, I discussed some issues I had encountered with some of SageMath’s installation options, and that I got it installed and working well on a Mac using the binary downloads that are available. I also hinted that I was able to create a Docker container … Read more
