[SciPy-user] Any Books on SciPy?

[Fernando Perez]

On 2/28/07, Gael Varoquaux <gael.varoquaux at normalesup.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 11:19:51PM -0700, Fernando Perez wrote:
> > http://amath.colorado.edu/faculty/fperez/tmp/py4science.pdf

I'll reply on-list since you sent it on-list :)  But feel free to ask
off-list anything in particular.

> Nice ! Really nice ! I am very happy that someone is writing something
> about all this in a consistent way.

Thanks, but it's unfortunately a bit of a stillborn effort at this point.

> I have two questions: what will be the distribution mode (printed matter,
> internet and free, both) ? This is important because an easily and freely
> available book really helps spreading the word. Second question: what
> will be the licence ? The reason I ask this is that I could consider
> trying to contribute if I can reuse the part I contribute.

Well, nothing had been set in stone yet, but I'd favor a combination
of a printed book by a publisher with some track record in science,
hopefully with an agreement that would allow free online
redistribution.  Such things have been done recently, so perhaps
convincing a publisher of this might not be altogether impossible.

> As you are probably aware (I think you follow the enthought-dev ML)
> Prabhu and I are currently trying to find time to code a nice "mlab"
> interface to mayavi2. Once it has made some progress (expect two to three
> months) it will be much nicer than the current way of using mayavi from
> python. Of course there is the problem that mayavi2 is not properly
> distributed currently. That might change as enthought is currently
> pushing for a modular eggs-based version of their tool suite.

I know, I've been quietly following that discussion with the utmost
interest.  I'm hoping it will be ready by Saturday, b/c I'm having a
mini-sprint at my house with some students to port some old CFD code
to the new mayavi.  So you have 3 days to finish it :)

> Anyway if we can get something out of mayavi's mlab, I could write
> document how to use it and contribute a modified version of it to your
> book.
>
> Similarly you could use a modified version of my traitsUI tutorial
> http://www.gael-varoquaux.info/computers/traits_tutorial/index.html if
> you think this is not out of scope.
>
> Thumbs up for such work !

Thanks!

But as I said, while I'm quite open on the possibilities for licensing
and distribution, the grim reality is that right now, I simply don't
have /any/ time to put into this.  All of my 'free' (funny, I know)
time right now has to go into pushing the new code effort for
distributed and parallel computing in ipython.  We've made good
progress recently on that front and some of the things that were
holding back integration of the trunk into the dev branch, so that we
might finally have a single codebase.

So while it would be very nice for this to be finished, realistically
I don't see that coming from me in the near future.

Regards,

f