In this short lecture, I want to make a couple of points about how Python is used in this course and actually about learning Python or any programming language in general. Knowing how to code is not a binary state, where you don't know how to code at one instant in time and at some later instant, you do know how to code.

Coding is essentially just the process of writing out a set of instructions, so fundamentally at some level we all know how to code. We're all just at different levels of proficiency. The more proficient you become, the more elegantly you can write code, but everyone more or less can code!

The best way to improve at any new skill, including coding, is by doing it. Coding tutorials can get you started, but your skill never really develops until you start working on a project of your own. In this course, we're not going to have any specific lectures on Python syntax or data structures because I don't think it's necessary.

This course won't make you a Python developer, but it will equip you with enough tools and knowledge to start using Python in your everyday work or study as an engineer. And once you start using what you learn here in your everyday work - you'll see your proficiency and ability rapidly increase.

It's remarkable how little you actually need to know, before you can take the training wheels off and start writing effective code that gets the job done. You're going to see that first hand in this course. Although we won't have done any formal 'how-to' Python lectures, you'll be confident in firing up a Jupyter notebook and coding together a structural dynamics simulation by the end of the course. As I said, you should also start to see where there are opportunities to leverage Python elsewhere in your study or work.

So, to sum up,

• You don't need to know Python before starting this course.
• Some familiarity with any programming language would be an advantage but it is by no means essential.
• In essence, we'll be using Python as a tool to perform dynamic analysis and model dynamic structural behaviour.
• In terms of Python, you'll learn what you need as we progress through the course.

That's all for this one, in the next lecture we'll get a Jupyter development environment up and running on your computer.