[Numpy-discussion] www.numpy.org home page

Chris Barker - NOAA Federal chris.barker at noaa.gov
Mon Dec 17 15:30:04 EST 2012


On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 7:48 AM, klo <klonuo at gmail.com> wrote:

>> "NumPy 1.5 Beginner's Guide", Ivan Idris,
>> http://www.packtpub.com/numpy-1-5-using-real-world-examples-beginners-guide/book

> Some reviews on first title:
>
> http://gael-varoquaux.info/blog/?p=161
> http://glowingpython.blogspot.com/2011/12/book-review-numpy-15-beginners-guide.html

Interesting -- I was asked to review the Numpy 1.5 Beginner's Guide,
and I did read through the whole thing, and make notes, but never
wrote up a full review. One reason is that I found it hard to motivate
myself to write what would have been a bad review. I don't really
disagree with the summaries provided in the two reviews above, but I
found two things:

1) There was too much wasted space in the book -- places where there
would be a nice example, then another one that was the same thing,
but, for example, using a different random number distribution -- we
really don't need to see almost identical code and plots take up
another bunch of pages -- i.e. I think the book could have been maybe
half as long with about the same content.

2) -- and this is worse -- The author did not seem to be all that
familiar with the real strengths of numpy and idiomatic numpy code --
it felt like almost a translation of MATLAB material, or at least
written by someone that had not yet made the full transition to numpy
from another language. Aside from small style issues was the glaring
omission of any discussion of array broadcasting!

So it may be hard to reach a consensus on a book being "good"!

That being said, I don't have a problem with listing this book on
numpy sites -- though it would be nice to have easy access of reviews
right there, too.

-Chris


-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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