Ivan Idris - NumPy Cookbook

Ivan Idris has an MSc in Experimental Physics. His graduation thesis had a strong emphasis on Applied Computer Science. After graduating, he worked for several companies as a Java Developer, Data Warehouse Developer, and QA Analyst. His main professional interests are business intelligence, big data, and cloud computing. He enjoys writing clean, testable code, and interesting technical articles. He is the author of NumPy 1.5 Beginner's Guide . You can find more information and a blog with a few NumPy examples at ivanidris.net.

I would like to dedicate this book to my family and friends. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the reviewers and the team at Packt for making this book possible. Thanks also goes to my teachers, professors, and colleagues, who taught me about science and programming. Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge my parents, family, and friends for their support.

Alexandre Devert is a computer scientist. To put his happy obsessions to good use, he decided to solve optimization problems, in both academic and industrial contexts. This included all kinds of optimization problems, such as civil engineering problems, packing problems, logistics problems, biological engineering problemsyou name it. It involved throwing lots of science on the wall and seeing what sticks. To do so, he had to analyze and visualize large amounts of data quickly, for which Python, NumPy, Scipy, and Matplotlib excel. Thus, the latter are among the daily tools he has been using for a couple of years. He also lectures on Data mining at the University of Science and Technology of China, and uses those very same tools for demonstration purposes and to enlighten his students with graphics glittering of anti-aliased awesomeness.

I would like to thank my significant other for her understanding my usually hefty work schedule, and my colleagues, for their patience with my shallow interpretation of concepts such as a "deadline".

Ludovico Fischer is a software developer working in the Netherlands. By day, he builds enterprise applications for large multinational companies. By night, he cultivates his academic interests in mathematics and computer science, and plays with mathematical and scientific software.

Ryan R. Rosario is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles. He works at Riot Games as a Data Scientist, and he enjoys turning large quantities of massive, messy data into gold. He is heavily involved in the open source community, particularly with R, Python, Hadoop, and Machine Learning, and has also contributed code to various Python and R projects. He maintains a blog dedicated to Data Science and related topics at http://www.bytemining.com. He has also served as a technical reviewer for NumPy 1.5 Beginner's Guide .

www.PacktPub.com

Support files, eBooks, discount offers and more

You might want to visit www.PacktPub.com for support files and downloads related to your book.

Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub files available? You can upgrade to the eBook version at > for more details.

At www.PacktPub.com, you can also read a collection of free technical articles, sign up for a range of free newsletters and receive exclusive discounts and offers on Packt books and eBooks.

http://PacktLib.PacktPub.com

Do you need instant solutions to your IT questions? PacktLib is Packt's online digital book library. Here, you can access, read and search across Packt's entire library of books.

Why Subscribe?

• Fully searchable across every book published by Packt
• Copy and paste, print and bookmark content
• On demand and accessible via web browser

Free Access for Packt account holders

If you have an account with Packt at www.PacktPub.com, you can use this to access PacktLib today and view nine entirely free books. Simply use your login credentials for immediate access.

Preface

We, NumPy users, live in exciting times. New NumPy-related developments seem to come to our attention every week or maybe even daily. When this book was being written, NumPy Foundation of Open Code for Usable Science was created. The Numba projectNumPy-aware, dynamic Python compiler using LLVMwas announced. Also, Google added support to their Cloud product Google App Engine.

In the future, we can expect improved concurrency support for clusters of GPUs and CPUs. OLAP-like queries will be possible with NumPy arrays.

This is wonderful news, but we have to keep reminding ourselves that NumPy is not alone in the scientific (Python) software ecosystem. There is Scipy, Matplotlib (a very useful Python plotting library), IPython (an interactive shell), and Scikits. Outside of the Python ecosystem, languages such as R, C, and Fortran are pretty popular. We will go into the details of exchanging data with these environments.

What this book covers

, Winding Along with IPhython , covers IPython that is a toolkit, mostly known for its shell. The web-based notebook is a new and exciting feature, which we will cover in detail. Think of Matlab and Mathematica, but in your browser, that is open source and free.

, Advanced Indexing and Array Concepts