Introduction to programming for Physics and Astronomy

This is the mini-course in programming for first year physics and astronomy students at the University of Amsterdam. It is a fast paced course that is designed to be given in 8 hours of hands-on practice a week.

Each first week contains a little bit of theory, small exercises and a few larger exercises for more experienced students (hacker editions). The following week has larger problems in the domain of mathematics and physics, that use all of the concepts of previous weeks.

In this edition, the course also leans on students preparing through reading chapters of the Think Python book.

Topics

1. Basic constructs of programming

   • Introduction to programs
   • Variables, expressions and statements
   • Conditionals
   • Iteration
   • Lists

2. Abstraction and strings

   • Functions
   • Recursion
   • Fruitful functions
   • Strings
   • The math and pyplot libraries

3. Complex types in Python

   • Dictionaries
   • Tuples
   • Files
   • Debugging

Acknowledgements

The course is mostly based on MIT's 6.189 and 6.00, both of which are available at the MIT OpenCourseWare site.