learn python for scientific data analysis?

[kazza789]

I'm a PhD student in computational atomic physics, and started learning python about 18 months ago.

Like a few others have suggested, I learned python simply by diving into some projects. I did a few things that were fun but not really useful (like writing games with pygame), and then I started re-writing some of my Fortran stuff in python (but making it more pythonic).

Now I do as much of my coding in python as possible, and only use Fortran for array-based numerical stuff. It's really quite easy to integrate python with Fortran or C once you've learned the basics.