Sage Beginner's Guide

by Craig Finch

This is a beginner's guide with clear step-by-step instructions, explanations, and advice. Each concept is illustrated with a complete example that you can use as a starting point for your own work. If you are an engineer, scientist, mathematician, or student, this book is for you. To get the most from Sage by using the Python programming language, we'll give you the basics of the language to get you started. For this, it will be helpful if you have some experience with basic programming concepts.

364 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 25, 2011

About the author

Craig Finch is a computational scientist, engineer and entrepreneur based in Orlando, Florida. Craig is the author of the book Sage Beginner’s Guide, in addition to many journal and conference publications. He develops modeling, simulation, and data analysis tools to solve practical problems in engineering and business. Craig has experience managing a wide variety of projects including hardware for wireless mobile devices, custom software for engineering design, and web services. His specialty is "bootstrapping" new projects. He is a co-founder of Service Analytics, Inc. and offers consulting services through Craig Finch Designs, LLC.

Craig holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Modeling and Simulation. He started his career as a design engineer at Sawtek (now TriQuint Semiconductor) and later worked in bioengineering research in the Hybrid Systems Lab at the NanoScience Technology Center at the University of Central Florida (UCF). He currently works for the STOKES Advanced Research Computing Center at the Institute for Simulation and Training at UCF. In this position Craig is responsible for all aspects of a high-performance Linux cluster and acts as an internal consultant to help researchers at UCF implement their scientific and engineering simulations on the cluster.

Dr. Finch is interested in developing mathematical models and simulation software to predict the behavior of physical systems. He has worked with many types of simulations including computational electromagnetics, computational fluid dynamics, multi-physics and molecular modeling. He is familiar with many open-source software tools for scientific applications. His favorite programming language is Python.

Reviews

[Louis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like to use Python for modeling and data analysis, and I tell my students that I consider Matlab, R and Python moral equivalents, made in kind by their wrapping of various numerical Fortran libraries, data structures for matrices and vectors, and numerous specialized libraries. But while there are Matlab books for every combination of field and level, and R books for every branch of statistics under the sun, Python books for data analysis are rare. Most introduction books are aimed at computer administrators or web programmers. Material on the web for scientists tended to be reference material that explained the functions available. The few in depth books seemed to assume that you were already a competent scientific programmer who was adding a new language to the toolkit. Sage: Beginner's Guide is meant for the person who is learning scientific programming, and doing so using Sage. As such it is highly useful for those who are being introduced to scientific computing in Python world.

While I use Sage and Python in technical programming myself, I have not been able to successfully teach someone else to do the same. What Finch does is to introduce someone not only to tools available for Python programmers, but instructions on setting up the environment, the practice of technical programming, but also the idea that each of these steps sets up something else.

Sage is a large and highly capable program, so any book has to focus somewhere. So the chapters can be thought of as covering the following (Note: this is NOT a chapter listing):

- Introduction and installation of Sage
- Use of Sage as an interactive environment
- Python programming: Introductory and advanced programming
- Numerical methods: Linear algebra, solving equations, numeric integration, ODE
- Symbolic math: algebra and calculus
- Plotting: 2D and 3D

In each substantive chapter, topics are covered in a standard pattern. A brief narrative description, a short sample program that uses the concept, a description of what program does and why the output looks like it does, then sometimes there are exercises that you can use to confirm you understand the concept or build your intuitive understanding.

What is missing? These are probably additional topics for "Where do we go from here" chapter. First, they do not take advantage of the Python ecosystem. Because of the basics of Numpy, Scipy and Matplotlib, numerous other scientific libraries exist that are not in Sage. I would include some notes on installing packages for use in Sage (which requires some modifications to the standard procedures). Also, an explicit mention of Scipy, since it is the basis for a number of other scientific packages in Python.

Sage: Beginner's Guide is a great addition to the library. It fills the role of the introduction to technical programming in Python that for Matlab is filled by professors who teach computational science/engineering courses. I envision that my copy of the book will be loaned out to one student after another for some time to come.

(Note: I received a free copy of Sage: Beginner's Guide for review from Packt Publishing)

[Mike Lisanke · Rating 1 out of 5]

I aborted reading this book as I ran SageMath on Cocalc site and got syntax errors with the very 1st example! To me, it's OK to prep the reader by warning there may be many versions of a software system where major language syntax changes have occurred. But to have the SageMath website referenced in the book recommend using an online testbed website to get started... one would expect a Book for Beginners would have example code which Has been tested to work There!

IMO, this is Big problem with programming books which must be solved Before press!