Physics 20 Reading List for the week of 2/14/2005

First, read Sec. 16.1 of Numerical Recipes, on the Runge-Kutta method.

Second, on object-oriented programming, see this rather complete article in the Wikipedia (follow your whim in following hyperlinks). Also, skim through C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup's What is "Object-Oriented" Programming: Stroustrup's examples are in C++, but his focus is more general.

Next, you can learn about implementing OOP techniques in Python
- in your favorite manual;
- in Guido van Rossum's Python tutorial;
- if you can stand the ads or disable them somehow, in the Developer Shed's tutorials (part 1, part 2);
- more advanced material is discussed in Thinking in Python (still incomplete) by Bruce Eckel.
You should at the very least have an understanding of class definitions, of class and instance objects, and of class methods (including constructors).

Last, you should also check out the special methods of Python, and in particular those related to numeric types.