Book Image

NumPy Essentials

By : Leo (Liang-Huan) Chin, Tanmay Dutta, Shane Holloway
Book Image

NumPy Essentials

By: Leo (Liang-Huan) Chin, Tanmay Dutta, Shane Holloway

Overview of this book

In today’s world of science and technology, it’s all about speed and flexibility. When it comes to scientific computing, NumPy tops the list. NumPy gives you both the speed and high productivity you need. This book will walk you through NumPy using clear, step-by-step examples and just the right amount of theory. We will guide you through wider applications of NumPy in scientific computing and will then focus on the fundamentals of NumPy, including array objects, functions, and matrices, each of them explained with practical examples. You will then learn about different NumPy modules while performing mathematical operations such as calculating the Fourier Transform; solving linear systems of equations, interpolation, extrapolation, regression, and curve fitting; and evaluating integrals and derivatives. We will also introduce you to using Cython with NumPy arrays and writing extension modules for NumPy code using the C API. This book will give you exposure to the vast NumPy library and help you build efficient, high-speed programs using a wide range of mathematical features.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
NumPy Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

The basic structure of an extension module


An extension module written in C will have the following parts:

  • A header segment, where you include all your external libraries and Python.h
  • An initialization segment, where you define the module name and the functions in your C module
  • A method structure array to define all the functions in your module
  • An implementation segment, where you define all the functions that you would like to expose

The header segment

Header snippets are quite standard, just like a normal C module. We need to include the Python.h header file to give our C code access to the internals of the C-API. This file is present in <path_to_python>/include. We will be using an array object in our example code, hence we have included the numpy/arrayobject.h header file as well. We don't need to specify the full path of the header file here as the path resolution is taken care of in setup.py, which we will take a look at later:

/* 
Header Segment 
*/ 
 
#include...