Prerequisites

This book uses the Python 3 programming language, along with a standard set of numerical and data visualization tools in astronomy, scientific experiments, and open-source projects. According to regular surveys, Python is the primary programming language of about 80% of astronomers today. By learning the Python language, you will join a community of millions of software developers and data scientists.

Getting Started.

A Python program can be executed by any computer, regardless of manufacturer or operating system, provided that support for the language is installed. If you wish to install the version of Python and the libraries that will match this book, we recommend the Python 3 language interpreter. You can also use web-based environments such as Google Colab, Deepnote, etc.

This text includes a complete introduction to all of these computational tools. You will learn to write programs, generate figures and files from data, and work with public real-world data sets.