Introduction to Python for Neuroscientists

Authors

Lucas da Costa Campos, INM-1/ICS-2 Forschungszentrum Juelich

Note

Parts of this course were adapted from a course given by Dr. Sebastian Rode and Lucas da Costa Campos for the IHRS Biosoft summer students.

What is it?

This is a very hands-on course on Python. We aim at the bachelor-level student, who is having the first contact with Python.

This course is divided into several steps:

1. Basic Python. Here, you will learn how to use the very basic parts of Python. Numbers, operators, basic data structures.
2. Auxiliary Libraries. Libraries for numerical computing (Numpy) and plotting (Matplotlib) are introduced, and their basic usage.
3. Input/Output. How to get data in and out of your code. You will learn how to use plain text files, npz files and excel files.
4. Extras Miscellaneous information on useful tasks. Currently contains

• Timing a process
• Data fitting

Requirements

We make extensive use of Jupyter notebooks. You will also need the following Python libraries installed

• Numpy
• Scipy
• Matplotlib
• Pandas

All of these can be download as a bundle in the anaconda distribution.

Directories

• Problems: This contains the problems, with comments for students to complete to get the systems up and running.
• Solutions: Here you can find the solutions to the previous problems, with the completed code running.