Preface
Unlike the stereotypical wedding dress, it was — to use a technical term —
elegant, like a computer algorithm that achieves an impressive outcome
with just a few lines of code.
Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Effect
Welcome to Elegant SciPy. We’re going to spend rather a lot of time
focusing on the “SciPy” bit of the title, so let’s take a moment to reflect on
the “Elegant” bit. There are plenty of manuals, tutorials, and documentation
websites out there that describe the SciPy library. Elegant SciPy goes further.
More than just teaching you how to write code that works, we will inspire
you to write code that rocks!
In The Rosie Effect (hilarious book; go read its prequel The Rosie Project
when you’re done with Elegant SciPy), Graeme Simsion twists the
conventions of the word “elegant” around. Most would use it to describe the
visual simplicity, style, and grace of, say, the first iPhone. Instead Graeme
Simsion’s hero, Don Tillman, uses a computer algorithm to define elegance.
We hope that you will understand exactly what he means after reading this
book; that you will read or write a piece of elegant code, and feel calmed in
the glow of its beauty and grace. (Note: The authors may be prone to
hyperbole.)
A good piece of code just feels right. When you look at it, its intent is clear, it
is often concise (but not so concise as to be obscure), and it is efficient at
executing the task at hand. For the authors, the joy of analyzing elegant code
lies in the lessons hidden within, and the way it inspires us to be creative in
how we approach new coding problems.
Ironically, creativity can also tempt us to show off cleverness at the expense
of the reader, and write obtuse code that is hard to understand. PEP8 (the
Python style guide) and PEP20 (the Zen of Python) remind us that “code is
read much more often than it is written” and therefore “readability counts.”
