this book was originally written as set of lecture notes to the book primer on scientific programming with python by hans petter langtangen and can be used either as supplement to that book or on its ownas compact introduction to scientific programming langtangen' book and these lecture noteshave formed the core of an introductory course on scientific programming at the university of oslo (inf /in etcs creditsthe course has been running since and is primarily taken by first-year students of mathematicsengineeringphysicschemistryand geosciences the writing of these lecture notesand their subsequent evolution into bookwere primarily motivated by two factors the first was that many students found the nearly pages of langtangen' book bit overwhelming as first introduction to programming this effect could be mostly psychologicalsince the book is well structured and suited for selective study of and sectionsbut the student feedback from students still indicated the need for more compact and (literallylightweight introduction the second factor was thatsadlyhans petter langtangen passed away in and his book has therefore not been updated to the newest versions of python and the various tools introduced in the book this issue could also be mostly mental obstaclesince the differences between the python versions are quite smalland only minor edits are needed to make most of the examples from the original book run on the newest python platform howeverthe book is intended as an introduction to programmingand when learning an entirely new topicany minor inconsistency is potential source of confusion therefore saw the need for an updated document where all the code examples would run without any modifications on the most common python platforms that saidin spite of these minor shortcomings as an introductory textlangtangen' book is still an excellent resource on scientific programming in python compared with the present bookit covers much hans petter langtangena primer on scientific programming with python th editionspringer-verlag ix