Handbook of the Physics Computing Course

Next: Contents

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Copyright © 2002 Michael Williams; this document may be copied, distributed and/or modified under certain conditions, but it comes WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; see the Design Science License for more details.

A copy of the license is:

• included in the L^ATEX distribution of this document--see http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sann1276/python.

• always available at http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt.

• Contents
• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1 The Python trial
  • 1.2 Typographical conventions
• 2. Using the system
  • 2.1 Logging in
  • 2.2 IDLE basics
    • 2.2.1 Creating a new program
    • 2.2.2 Opening existing programs
    • 2.2.3 Saving programs
    • 2.2.4 Closing programs
  • 2.3 Programming using IDLE
    • 2.3.1 Using the interactive interpreter
    • 2.3.2 Using the editor
  • 2.4 Case sensitivity
• 3. The elements of Python
  • 3.1 Hello world
  • 3.2 Interpreters, modules, and a more interesting program
  • 3.3 Variables
    • 3.3.1 Names and Assignment
    • 3.3.2 Types
  • 3.4 Input and output
  • 3.5 Arithmetic
  • 3.6 for loops
    • 3.6.1 An example of a for loop
    • 3.6.2 Using the range function
  • 3.7 if statements
    • 3.7.1 An example of an if test
    • 3.7.2 Comparison tests and Booleans
    • 3.7.3 else and elif statements
  • 3.8 while loops
  • 3.9 Using library functions
  • 3.10 Arrays
  • 3.11 Making your own functions
  • 3.12 File input and output
  • 3.13 Putting it all together
• 4. Graphical output and additional Python
  • 4.1 Graphical output
  • 4.2 Arrays in Python
  • 4.3 Functions you may need for the first-year problems
    • 4.3.1 Reading files
    • 4.3.2 Random numbers
  • 4.4 Scope
  • 4.5 Python differences
    • 4.5.1 for loops
  • 4.6 Taking your interest further
• A. Errors
  • A.1 Attribute Errors, Key Errors, Index Errors
  • A.2 Name Errors
  • A.3 Syntax Errors
  • A.4 Type Errors
• B. Reserved Words
• About this document ...

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Handbook of the Physics Computing Course

Next: Contents

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Documentation released on December 3, 2002.