the first few steps may want to analyze these data in excel and make some graphics out of it howeverassume there is no menu in excel that allows you to import data in this specific format excel can work with many different data formatsbut not this one you start searching for alternatives to excel that can do the same and read this type of data files maybe you cannot find any ready-made program directly applicable you have reached the point where knowing how to write programs on your own would be of great help to youwith some programming skillsyou may write your own little program which can translate one data format to another with that little piece of tailored codeyour data may be read and analyzedperhaps in excelor perhaps by new program tailored to the computations that the measurement data demand the real power of computers can only be utilized if you can program them by programming you can get the computer to do (most often!exactly what you want programming consists of writing set of instructions in very specialized language that has adopted words and expressions from english such languages are known as programming or computer languages the set of instructions is given to program which can translate the meaning of the instructions into real actions inside the computer the purpose of this book is to teach you to write such instructions dedicated to solve mathematical and engineering problems by fundamental numerical methods there are numerous computer languages for different purposes within the engineering areathe most widely used computer languages are pythonmatlaboctavefortrancc++and to some extent mapleand mathematica how you write the instructions ( the syntaxdiffers between the languages let us use an analogy assume you are an international kind of personhaving friends abroad in englandrussia and china they want to try your favorite cake what can you dowellyou may write down the recipe in those three languages and send them over nowif you have been able to think correctly when writing down the recipeand you have written the explanations according to the rules in each languageeach of your friends will produce the same cake your recipe is the "computer program"while englishrussian and chinese represent the "computer languageswith their own rules of how to write things the end productthoughis still the same cake note that you may unintentionally introduce errors in your "recipedepending on the errorthis may cause "baking executionto stopor perhaps produce the wrong cake in your computer programthe errors you introduce are called bugs (yessmall insectsfor historical reasons)and the process of fixing them is called debugging when you try to run your program that contains errorsyou usually get warnings or error messages howeverthe response you get depends on the error and the programming language you may even get no responsebut simply the wrong "cakenote that the rules of programming language have to be followed very strictly this differs from languages like english etc where the meaning might be understood even with spelling errors and "slangincluded this book comes in two versionsone that is based on pythonand one based on matlab both python and matlab represent excellent programming environments for scientific and engineering tasks the version you are reading nowis the python version some of python' strong properties deserve mention heremany global functions can be placed in only one filefunctions are straightforwardly transferred as