Overview

Many scientists and engineers spend much of their lives programming, but only a handful have ever been taught how to do this well. As a result, they spend their time wrestling with software, instead of doing research, but have no idea how reliable or efficient their programs are.

This course is an intensive introduction to basic software development practices for scientists and engineers that can reduce the time they spend programming by 20-25%. All of the material is open source: it may be used freely by anyone for educational or commercial purposes, and research groups in academia and industry are actively encouraged to adapt it to their needs.

News

Thanks to a generous grant from The MathWorks, a new version of this course with examples in MATLAB is in production. We'll be looking for beta testers in March 2009---please let us know if you'd like to give it a test drive.

Access

• Via Subversion: http://swc.scipy.org/svn/swc/tags/2.0
• As one large page
• As a gzip'd tar file or zip file

Acknowledgments

This work has been made possible by the Python Software Foundation, the University of Toronto, and The MathWorks. See Acknowledgments for more details, and License for terms of re-use.

Links

• "Where's the Real Bottleneck in Scientific Computing?", from American Scientist.
• The slides from Greg Wilson's talk at SciPy'06.
• The announcement and development mailing lists.
• Trac (project management)
• If you have questions, please contact Greg Wilson.

Lectures