Content and Learning Objectives

The topics in this chapter contain a very basic introduction to scientific computing in Python.

After working through this chapter, you should be able to:

• explain why numpy has laid the basis for Python having become the standard for machine learning applications

• explain why the sentence “Python is slow” only makes sense if you ignore libraries

• create, manipulate, and make calculations using numpy arrays

• describe what broadcasting is and look up how it works when you need it

• remember and follow best practices for generating random numbers