With trustlet, I’m finally getting to a point where we can do cool stuff, evaluating prediction graphs of trust metrics. Now I need to refresh my Python array stuff. Since last time I was using that stuff, in 2004, they have refactored it (once more) and called it numpy. That’s fine. But, in order to read an important part of the documentation you need to pay 39.99 US$. Now, that’s less and less by the day, but still, it’s very inconvenient, and probably holding back wider acceptation of Python in the scientific community. Like software, documentation should be free. I might even pay if the author would have chosen to use the Creative Commons ShareAlike NonCommercial Attribution license - but then I would be able to pass on the information to my friends (even they are all over the internet).
I think it would have been a wiser choice to find a job at some institute or company to further the development of numpy and scipy, and its documentation in a freer way. That shouldn’t be too hard these days.
That is just plain crazy, $40 for documentation that tells you want open source code does. Argh, irritating. I suppose it would be possible to rewrite the documentation from the book, probably legal, but a major pain in the ass…
well, the tutorial seems to be available for free:
http://www.scipy.org/Tentative_NumPy_Tutorial
inspect() is a good helper to find about members.
cheers,
Hmm, I’ve never tried inspect before. Usually IPython’s built-in ? is enough if there are good __doc__ strings around. E.g.