Python is…

• popular,
• powerful,
• easy to learn
• programming language
• that is human readable,
• free,
• and open source.

Libraries

It has excellent libraries for

• mathematics
• plotting,
• and domain sciences.

Tasks that Python could help you do:

• Transform your data files from one arbitrary format to another.
• Analyze image files.
• Loop through all the files in a directory, perform an analysis on them, and plot the results.
• Almost anything!

Packages

Contain extensions to the language for specific tasks. The Python Package Index has more than 48k packages, including some for:

• analyzing biological sequence data,
• numerical analyses,
• plotting,
• and much more.

Why Python and not …

Perl? → Python is easier to read and learn.

Javascript or Ruby? → Python has more good numerical libraries.

MATLAB or SAS? → Python is free.

R? → Depends on the task at hand. R has some advantages in statistics and visualization, but Python is a more flexible option that can perform many different tasks well.

IPython notebook

IPython notebook

An interactive shell for using Python.

• Browser based notebooks to organize and display code
• Simplifies data visualization
• Makes it easy to share whole analysis pipelines

Learn More

• python.org
• ipython.org