Python, originally developed as a general-purpose programming language, has gained its popularity in the scientific community in recent years owing to its elegant and easy-to-understand syntax and powerful libraries. Python fully supports both functional and object-oriented programming styles. This class will discuss a number useful features of Python in the context of scientific computing, and introduce a number of supporting packages, including numpy for fast array-based computations, h5py to access HDF5 files, and the use of Python in MPI-style parallel computing.