This course is developed to teach programming and algorithmic thinking to scientists. It is not meant to be a course to teach a single language, although for simplicity everything will be presented in the same language (python), but to serve as a general course of algorithmic thinking. This enables the student to solve the repetitive tasks of research by programming and to spend his valuable time on the real questions.
I often experienced that other scientists, who don't know how to programm, think that it might be usefull to know how to program. But they don't really see what exactly they could use it for. Only as an experienced programmer you see where a small script can save you a lot of work or you immediately know the right data structure for an experiment that simplifies the whole data analysis just be the choice of representation of the data. Exactly this thinking is what I try to teach in this course. The idea is to introduce programming and algorithmic thinking step by step and more importantly, to show examples of what this is good for from the beginning on. Already from the second lecture on you'll see that programming can save you a lot of work. And that it can be fun..