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 – reading and writing files


As an example of file I/O, we will create an identity matrix and store its contents in a file. Perform the following steps to do so:

  1. The identity matrix is a square matrix with ones on the main diagonal and zeroes for the rest. The identity matrix can be created with the eye function. The only argument we need to give the eye function is the number of ones. So, for instance, for a 2 x 2 matrix, write the following code:

    i2 = np.eye(2)
    print i2
    The output is:
    [[ 1.  0.]
    [ 0.  1.]]
  2. Save the data using the savetxt function. We obviously need to specify the name of the file that we want to save the data in and the array containing the data itself.

    np.savetxt("eye.txt", i2)

A file called eye.txt should have been created. You can check for yourself whether the contents are as expected. The code for this example can be downloaded from the book support website http://www.packtpub.com/support (see save.py).

import numpy as np

i2 = np.eye(2)
print i2
np.savetxt...