third way to use python is through jupyter notebookswhich are form of interactive notebooks that combine code and text the notebooks are viewed through browser and look quite similar to simple web pagebut with the important difference that the code segments are "livepython code that can be runchangedand re-run while reading the document these features are particularly useful for teaching purposessince detailed explanations of new concepts are easily combined with interactive examples all the of this book are also available as jupyter notebooks minor drawbacks of the python language although python is very popular and suitable language for learning to programit also has some minor drawbacks one of the more important is tightly linked to its advantage of being flexible high-level language with short and intuitive syntax writing small programs in python can be very efficientand beginners can quickly start writing useful programsbut the downside is that the code can become messy as the programs grow in size and complexity other languages such as cc++and java tendto enforce more structure in the codewhich can be confusing for beginners and annoying when you want to write small program quicklybut it can be more efficient in the long run when writing larger programs howeverit is certainly possible to write neat and nicely structured programs in python as wellbut this requires choice by the programmer to follow certain principles of coding styleand is not enforced by the language itself another slightly annoying aspect of python is that it exists in different versions at the time of this writingpython has been dominant for quite whilebut if you look for programming resources online or read older textbooksyou will find many examples using python for the mathematicscentered programming covered in this bookthe difference between python and python is actually quite smallbut some differences are important to be aware of the most obvious one is how print works in python the program above would read print "helloworld!"that iswithout the parentheses since nearly all code examples use print to some extentprograms written in python will typically not run in python one particularly relevant resource for scientific python (on which this book is largely basedis " primer on scientific programming with python"by hans petter langtangen howeverthe latest version of that book was written in and all the code examples are in python and will stop with an error message if they are run in python in most casesthe only error is the missing parenthesesso the addition of parentheses to all the print statements will make most of the examples run fine in python we will comment on some of the other differences between the python versions later hans petter langtangena primer on scientific programming with python th editionspringer-verlag