This book has some great information, but seems a little inconsistent when it comes to the intended audience. The author says that it “presents an introduction to computational models and their implementation using the Python programming language.” It does do that, but it is a little unclear whether the primary intent is to teach numerical analysis or Python, or maybe a bit of both, to reasonably math-literate students. The author suggests that the student should have taken Calculus I, but a lot of the book would stand without quite that much.

The book feels more like class notes than a fully freestanding text. Specifically, there are very few illustrations, and it is possible to imagine that the chapters were originally accompanied by a live person drawing on the board. Without that, the content is somewhat dry and a little uneven in its difficulty and depth. Some areas are treated repetitively (why have several different ways of computing a series of data?) while others (like the packages Pyomo and Pulp) are introduced very quickly and almost in passing. The last few chapters of the book have some sophisticated ideas that are interesting for those teaching themselves, but there’s not a lot of background or very much in the way of “where to learn more” lists of websites or other resources.

As a programming book, it suffers from having no single place where you can look up the syntax and meaning of a function (or, just a list of functions). Function calls are introduced where they are first used, but the index does not seem to list them. Thus, if you want to dip around in the material and look at the code listings, you need to hunt to find the first introduction of a particular function and its definition wherever it is buried in the text. This makes it difficult to use as a self-teaching supplemental book. As someone who is a strong C programmer and who has used Python for one scientific project, I found myself doing online searches on functions regularly when dipping in and out of various parts of the book. A book meant to be a text really needs to be more inclusive that way, and it needs an appendix or a figure somewhere that pulls together definitions and links more effectively than just having them scattered throughout the narrative.

The link given in the book (at the end of the preface) for the source code and other files redirects to the author’s university web page. There is no apparent working link on that page for the material.

All that said, the individual nuggets are solid and the book could be used as a text for a one-semester programming class for engineers or scientists. If you do use it that way, though, create a list of functions and the page numbers where they appear so that your students (and you) can find things. It definitely has the virtue that the mathematics side of the content starts off simply and discusses issues of precision and accuracy up front. However, it jumps a bit too quickly from extremely simple examples to pretty complex ones, so you may need to curate either the front or the back of the book to fit your particular course goals.