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 NumPy, Matplotlib, and SciPy on Mac OS X


We will install NumPy with a GUI installer using the following steps:

  1. We can get a NumPy installer from the SourceForge website http://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy/files/. Similar files exist for Matplotlib and SciPy. Just change numpy in the previous URL to scipy or matplotlib. IPython didn't have a GUI installer at the time of writing. Download the appropriate DMG file as shown in the following screenshot, usually the latest one is the best:

  2. Open the DMG file as shown in the following screenshot (in this example, numpy-1.7.0-py2.7-python.org-macosx10.6.dmg):

    • Double-click on the icon of the opened box, the one having a subscript that ends with .mpkg. We will be presented with the welcome screen of the installer.

    • Click on the Continue button to go to the Read Me screen, where we will be presented with a short description of NumPy as shown in the following screenshot:

    • Click on the Continue button to the License the screen.

  3. Read the license, click on the Continue button and then on the Accept button, when prompted to accept the license. Continue through the next screens and click on the Finish button at the end.

What just happened?

We installed NumPy on Mac OS X with a GUI installer. The steps to install SciPy and Matplotlib are similar and can be performed using the URLs mentioned in the first step.