The aim of the book is to introduce students of engineering or natural sciences to programming as a key qualification with numerous application possibilities. Great emphasis is placed on a practical and comprehensible presentation. The author covers the application areas of operations research, medical informatics, and automation technology. In addition to presenting object-oriented design patterns, central programming concepts and advanced data structures are introduced. Search algorithms, graphs, automata, and regular languages are conveyed to the reader in a practical manner. The fundamentals of image processing in the areas of image filtering, registration, and segmentation complete the book.