Python resouces

General Python

Because Python is an Open-source programming language there is an almost limitless supply of online tutorials and resource materials for learning to program in Python.

• The official Python beginner's guide to programming (particularly Python for Non-Programmers and references therein) is a good place to start.
• Allen Downey has written an excellent book called Think Python: How to think like a computer scientist that is targeted at student's with little to no programming experience.
• Google Code University has a 2-day online Python course with lectures notes, slides, and video tutorials.
• Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python
• The official Python 2.7 documentation and tutorial.
• An excellent online Python course/tutorial (which happens to also be available in German!)
• Python Tutor: LEARN programming by visualizing code execution. Name says it all, pretty awesome! Definitely need to work this into teaching material somehow.
• Learn Python the hard way: The title is a misnomer. It would be better titled "Learn Python By Coding It." The author determined that learning python should be similar to learning an instrument. You don't get a book on scales, but you're taught a scale and practice it. The author teaches you how to code properly, how to think like a programmer, and develop quality problem solving skill through a set of 52 exercises that build on each other.
• Python Wikibook: Useful general resource for all things Python.

MIT opencourseware has a number of partial/full length semester courses on Python programming (highly recommended if you have a bit more time to devote to learning Python):

• Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science I has a short Python tutorial.
• CS 6.00 (2011): Introduction to Computer Science and Programming. The 2008 version of the course is still relevant (and the lecturer is more engaging). Both of these courses include video lectures as well as the usual course materials.
• CS 6.189 (2008): A Gentle Introduction to Programming Using Python

Specific Python libraries of interest to economists:

John Stachurski's lectures on computational economics are a great place to get started with both Python and computational economics.

A fantastic series of lectures (in the form of IPython notebooks!) on scientific computing in Python by J.R. Johansson.

• NumPy

• SciPy

• IPython: IPython is one of the main reasons that Python dominates open-source scientific computing. As a teaching and research tool the IPython notebook and Qt console are hard to beat.

• Pandas: Pandas

• Statsmodels

• SymPy

• mpmath

• matplotlib

• Random topical software links from SciPy documentation.