The reading list for scientific programmer

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I am working to become a scientific programmer. I have enough background in Math and Stat but rather lacking on programming background. I found it very hard to learn how to use a language for scientific programming because most of the reference for SP are close to trivial.

My work involves statistical/financial modelling and none with physics model. Currently, I use Python extensively with numpy and scipy. Done R/Mathematica. I know enough C/C++ to read code. No experience in Fortran.

I dont know if this is a good list of language for a scientific programmer. If this is, what is a good reading list for learning the syntax and design pattern of these languages in scientific settings.

scientific-computing fortran c c++
17 Answers

I'm a scientific programmer who just entered the field in the past 2 years. I'm into more biology and physics modeling, but I bet what you're looking for is pretty similar. While I was applying to jobs and internships there were two things that I didn't think would be that important to know, but caused me to end up missing out on opportunities. One was MATLAB, which has already been mentioned. The other was database design -- no matter what area of SP you're in, there's probably going to be a lot of data that has to be managed somehow.

The book Database Design for Mere Mortals by Michael Hernandez was recommended to me as being a good start and helped me out a lot in my preparation. I would also make sure you at least understand some basic SQL if you don't already.

user_2315970

Ok here's my list of books that I've been using for the very same purpose:

Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers

Numerical Recipes 3rd Edition: The Art of Scientific Computing

CUDA by Example: An Introduction to General-Purpose GPU Programming

Using OpenMP: Portable Shared Memory Parallel Programming (Scientific and Engineering Computation)

Parallel Programming in C with MPI and OpenMP

Donald Knuth: Seminumerical Algorithms, Volume 2 of The Art of Computer Programming

Also I found myself using R rather than Python lately.

Admin1

Reading source-code helps a lot, too. Python is great in this sense. I have learnt a great amount of information just by digging through the source codes of scientific Python tools. On top of this following your favourite tools' mailing-lists and forums can enhance your skills further.

user_1711730

For Java I recommend a look at Unit-API
Implementations are Eclipse UOMo (http://www.eclipse.org/uomo) or JScience.org (work in progress for Unit-API, earlier implementations of JSR-275 exist)

user_5863180
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