One of the nicethings about programming in python is that it is free, relatively easy to use,and there is lots of support and development online. One of the downsides isthat there is not a standard python package to install… you have to know aboutall the interesting add-on bits to get maximum usage out of python. Luckily,some enterprising astronomers and other programming-scientists have puttogether pre-packaged python distributions containing many of the most usefuladd-ons like numpy, scipy, matplotlib, atpy, etc.

In this post, Iwanted to introduce you to some other interesting features and packages thatmay be brand-new or not yet widely advertised. I’ll also include some newbooks/sites for learning python.

1. Anexcellent book, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, is now available as anonline-interactive version using the python language.

2. Anotherinteractive tutorial is based over at learn python.org andsaves you the headache of installing python if you are trying it for the firsttime.

1. If you aren’t hooked to emacs/vi, then you might be interested in Spyder, an interactive development environmentspecifically for scientific python use. I have no experience with this… anyonehave any feedback?

2. The latest version of IPython includes a new interactive web-based notebook.This is roughly modeled after MatLab notebooks. I have heard the installationcan still be a bit tricky, but it is a potentially powerful way to keepelectronic notes or even share/work with collaborators.