what would you like to see in a 2nd edition Nutshell?

[Fernando Perez]

Alex Martelli wrote:

> the coverage of Twisted and adding just a few things (numarray --
> perhaps premature to have it _instead_ of Numeric, though; dateutils,

You might want to keep in touch with the scipy/numarray gang on this particular
topic.  An effort is currently under way to make scipy work with numarray, and
matplotlib already works with numarray out of the box.  These two facts will,
I think, greatly accelerate the adoption of numarray and the transition away
from Numeric.  There are a few people (like me, unfortunately), who can simply
not use numarray because of the small array instatiation overhead.  But that
subcommunity tends to know enough to be able to deal with the problems by
itself.  Since numarray is indeed the long-term array core for Python, I think
the book would be better off by covering it.  Numarray is actively developed,
and vastly better documented than Numeric.

A mention of the particular problems with numarray might be a good idea, so
that readers are aware of Numeric and where it may still be preferable to
numarray, but with the understanding that it's a (shrinking) niche.  Hopefully
one day that niche will shrink to zero, but that is going to take time and
work.

Finally, I think in this section a mention of the overall scipy project would
be a good idea.  Scipy is the central meeting point for most scientific
computing projects in python, and therefore a natural reference for most users
of numarray/numeric.  Amongst other useful things at the scipy site, there's a
community maintained wiki of links to python-based projects of scientific
interest:

http://www.scipy.org/wikis/topical_software/TopicalSoftware

Regards,

f