Book Image

NumPy Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By : Ivan Idris
Book Image

NumPy Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By: Ivan Idris

Overview of this book

NumPy is an extension to, and the fundamental package for scientific computing with Python. In today's world of science and technology, it is all about speed and flexibility. When it comes to scientific computing, NumPy is on the top of the list. NumPy Beginner's Guide will teach you about NumPy, a leading scientific computing library. NumPy replaces a lot of the functionality of Matlab and Mathematica, but in contrast to those products, is free and open source. Write readable, efficient, and fast code, which is as close to the language of mathematics as is currently possible with the cutting edge open source NumPy software library. Learn all the ins and outs of NumPy that requires you to know basic Python only. Save thousands of dollars on expensive software, while keeping all the flexibility and power of your favourite programming language.You will learn about installing and using NumPy and related concepts. At the end of the book we will explore some related scientific computing projects. This book will give you a solid foundation in NumPy arrays and universal functions. Through examples, you will also learn about plotting with Matplotlib and the related SciPy project. NumPy Beginner's Guide will help you be productive with NumPy and have you writing clean and fast code in no time at all.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Numpy Beginner's Guide Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – installing Python on different operating systems


NumPy has binary installers for Windows, various Linux distributions, and Mac OS X. There is also a source distribution, if you prefer that. You need to have Python 2.4.x or above installed on your system. We will go through the various steps required to install Python on the following operating systems:

  1. Debian and Ubuntu: Python might already be installed on Debian and Ubuntu but the development headers are usually not. On Debian and Ubuntu install python and python-dev with the following commands:

    sudo apt-get install python
    sudo apt-get install python-dev
    
  2. Windows: The Windows Python installer can be found at www.python.org/download. On this website, we can also find installers for Mac OS X and source tarballs for Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X.

  3. Mac: Python comes pre-installed on Mac OS X. We can also get Python through MacPorts, Fink, or similar projects. We can install, for instance, the Python 2.7 port by running the following command:

    sudo port install python27
    

    LAPACK does not need to be present but, if it is, NumPy will detect it and use it during the installation phase. It is recommended to install LAPACK for serious numerical analysis as it has useful numerical linear algebra functionality.

What just happened?

We installed Python on Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, and the Mac.