Thanks to Eric Bellm’s idlmagic, it is now possible to use IDL inside an IPython notebook! For example, here’s the HTML output of the first section of Modern IDL as an IPython notebook (download notebook). Note there are some mistakes still, notably the printing of a string as a long array.
If this is not exciting to you, you need to learn more about IPython notebooks.
Modern IDL offers IDL programmers one place to look for explanation, techniques, and reference material, for beginners and advanced users alike.
"... But I've always wanted a thorough, concise, up-to-date overview of the the IDL language and its vast capabilities. This is exactly what Mike's book provides in 464 very informative pages... Highly recommended!"
—Mort Canty
I'm a software developer focusing on high-performance computing and visualization in scientific programming. I work mostly in IDL, but occasionally use C, CUDA, and Python.
I currently work for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) at the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory. Previously, I worked for Tech-X Corporation, where I was the main developer for GPULib, a library of IDL bindings for GPU accelerated computation routines.
I am the creator and main developer for the open source projects IDLdoc, mgunit, and rIDL.
Contact me at Mastodon or via email at mgalloy at gmail dot com. For more details about me, see my CV/resume.
Need consulting/instruction? Contact me.
GPULib enables IDL developers to access the high-performance capabilities of modern NVIDIA graphics cards without knowledge of CUDA programming.
TaskDL is a task-farming solution for IDL designed for problems with loosely-coupled, parallel applications where no communication between nodes of a cluster is required.
mpiDL is a library of IDL bindings for Message Passing Interface (MPI) used for tightly-coupled parallel applications.
The Remote Data Toolkit is a library of IDL routines allowing for easy access to various scientific data in formats such as OPeNDAP, HDF 5, and netCDF.
Modern IDL offers IDL programmers one place to look, for beginners and advanced users alike. This book also contains: a thorough tutorial on the core topics of IDL; a comprehensive introduction to the object graphics system; common problems and gotchas with many examples; advanced topics not normally found are discussed throughout the book: regular expressions, object graphics, advanced widget programming, performance, object-oriented programming, etc.
IDLdoc is an open source utility for generating documentation from IDL source code and specially formatted comments.
mgunit is an open source unit testing framework for IDL.
rIDL is an open source IDL command line replacement.
mglib is an open source library of IDL routines in areas of visualization, application development, command line utilities, analysis, data access, etc.
Copyright © 2006-2012 Michael Galloy, All Rights Reserved
October 1st, 2014 at 7:23 am
Hi Mike,
Hope you’re keeping well. One major component of the IPython notebook that I love is that you can publish a notebook, which is just a JSON/text document, anywhere public (such as as a GIST on github) and instantly have it rendered using the excellent nbviewer.ipython.org without the need for a live IPython kernel.
Best,
Phil Elson
October 1st, 2014 at 9:15 am
Yes, that is an awesome feature! Clever that even images are embedded in the text.