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This book is for mathematicians, scientists, and engineers who have learned the
very basics of programming in Python, and who would like to become more capable
programmers. In addition to covering higher level programming concepts such as
objects, inheritance, and abstract data types, emphasis is placed on
programming skills such as interpreting and debugging errors. If you find
yourself baffled by the pages of error messages that Python emits, and would
like to make sense of them, then this book is for you.

The book takes a mathematician's view of programming, introducing higher level
programming abstractions by analogy with the abstract objects that make up
higher mathematics. Examples and exercises are chosen from across mathematics,
though the actual mathematical knowledge required to understand this book is
limited to differentiating functions of one variable.

Dr David Ham is Reader in Computational Mathematics at Imperial College London.
He teaches the object-oriented programming course for undergraduate
mathematicians on which this book is based, as well as an advanced course on
the finite element method. His research focusses on high level abstractions and
code generation for forward and inverse finite element simulation.