An introduction to Python

Python is a programming language. It’s widely used in the scientific community due to the broad selection of feature-rich, actively maintained libraries. This means that a lot of software has already been written to solve problems common to our field, so you can concentrate on the interesting stuff!

These lessons (with the exception of the PyROOT part) are strongly based on those written by Software Carpentry and fall under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Aim of these lessons

There are already plenty of superb guides on the Internet for learning Python, all of which will be more comprehensive than this one. We expect you to be familiar with at least one other programming language, so that you understand sentences like "we assign value 123 to variable abc" and "this is a function which accepts two arguments". You should also understand the basics of using a text editor, which you use to write code to a file somewhere, and then you can somehow run the contents using commands in your terminal to make stuff happen.

Sounds good? Then let’s get going! What we cover in this part of the tutorial is the last section of this part - PyROOT. However, if you are completely unfamiliar with Python, you might find the first lessons quite interesting!