[SciPy-dev] draft: NumPy User Guide introduction

[Stéfan van der Walt]

Hi Andrew

2009/8/20 Andrew Hawryluk <HAWRYLA at novachem.com>:
> I have posted a first draft of a NumPy User Guide introduction.
> Hopefully it is both useful and factually correct, but please jump in
> where you see room for improvement.

Thanks for taking the time to work on this!

Some comments:

The array multiplication example is a bit confusing, unless you read
ahead to figure out that you are talking about 1-dimension arrays or
vectors. On the Python side there is a small typo (len instead of
len(a)), and on the C++ side the size is not defined.

The term universal function should be explained: a function that
operates on a single element of an array at a time, applied to all
elements.

I think it's best to encourage people to use np.* functions, instead
of arr.* methods (maybe others differ with me on this point?).

This is a good start, and I think it can be expanded with some more
examples.  I wrote an intro while working on the docs last year:

http://mentat.za.net/numpy/intro/intro.html

Unfortunately, numpy arrays are not easy to teach in one page, so
these introductions tend to grow!

Cheers
Stéfan