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