rtrjl / scipy-lecture-notes

Notes used to give tutorials (for example at Euroscipy 2010/2011)

Contents

This repository gathers some lecture notes on the scientific Python ecosystem. They have been initially used in the intro (and some advanced) tutorials at Euroscipy 2010, but have now grown to a full course of scientific computing with Python.

These documents are written with the rest markup language (.rst extension) and built using Sphinx: http://sphinx.pocoo.org/.

Reusing and distributing

As stated in the LICENSE.txt file, this material comes with no strings attached. Feel free to reuse and modify for your own teaching purposes.

However, we would like this reference material to be improved over time, thus we encourage people to contribute back changes. These will be reviewed and edited by the original authors.

Building instructions

To generate the html output for on-screen display, Type:

make html

the generated html files can be found in build/html

To generate the pdf file for printing:

make pdf

The pdf builder is a pointy and you might have some TeX errors. Tweaking the layout in the rst files is usually enough to work around these problems.

Requirements

probably incomplete

• make
• sphinx (>= 1.0)
• pdflatex
• pdfjam
• matplotlib
• scikit-learn (>= 0.8)

Contributing

Editorial policy

The goal of this material is to provide a concise text useful to learning the main features of the scipy ecosystem. If you want to contribute to reference material, we suggest that you contribute to the documentation of the specific packages that you are interested in.

The HTML output can be used for displaying on screen while teaching. The goal is to have the same material displayed as in the notes. This is why the HTML version should be kept concise, with bullet-lists rather than full-blown paragraphs and sentences. In the long run, we would like to build more elaborate discussions. For this, the policy is to use the:

.. only:: pdf

sphinx directive.

Modifying

The easiest way to make your own version of this teaching material is to fork it under Github, and use the git version control system to maintain your own fork. For this, all you have to do is create an account on github (this site) and click on the fork button, on the top right of this page. You can use git to pull from your fork, and push back to it the changes. If you want to contribute the changes back, just fill a pull request, using the button on the top of your fork's page.

Please refrain from modifying the Makefile unless it is absolutely necessary.

Figures and code examples

The figure should be generated from Python source files. The policy is to create an examples directory, in which you put the corresponding Python files. Any files with a name starting with plot_ will be run during the build process, and figures created by matplotlib will be saved as images in an auto_examples directory. You can use these to include in the document as figures. To display the code snippet, you can use the literal-include directive. Any additional data needed by the plotting script should be included in the same directory. NB: the code to provide this style of plot inclusion was adopted from the scikits.learn project and can be found in sphinxext/gen_rst.py.