There is no required textbook for the class. However, useful books on the subject for supplementary reading include:
We will be using Python for most of the programming in the course. I strongly suggest the “full SciPy stack”, which includes NumPy, MatPlotLib, SciPy, and iPython notebook for interactive work and visualization; see http://www.scipy.org/install.html for installation information.
We will use Python 2.7 by default, but try to program in a 3.x compatible way; if you find parts of the code do not work for more recent versions of Python please let me know the issue and I will try to fix it.