Hi PDlers,
The following appeared on one of our internal email lists - our dept.
is hiring David Fanning to do an intro to IDL course for astro
students here.
I post it here because I thought points (1)-(3) quite amusing. They
really have to waste time with that?
Karl
Begin forwarded message:
David Fanning's syllabus
------------------------
http://www.dfanning.com/documents/courses.html
And here is a brief description of a seminar I did last year for
the astronomers at the European Southern Observatory. This was
well received.
Topics for the Beginning Seminar:
1. Setting up your IDL session. How to get colors,
programs, and data organized for your work environment.
I will talk about PATHs, types of color visual environments,
and startup files. Find out why the code you got from
a colleague looks so lousy on your display. (It is NOT
because he/she is a lousy programmer!) How can you save
a record of your interactive IDL session?
2. How do colors work, anyway, in IDL!? Colors look one
way on your machine and another way on your colleague's
machine, and different again when you make a PostScript
file. How come? And isn't there a way to just ask for
a "green" or "yellow" line and get it? Find out how to
write a program where the colors look the same everywhere.
Why you really do want to use that 24-bit display you paid
so much money for.
3. Fifteen graphics keywords (out of hundreds) that you absolutely
must know to get nice looking graphics plots in IDL. Why axes
don't do what you tell them to do. Why plots aren't where you
want them in the window. How to put multiple plots in windows
and in PostScript output, and not have to write the code twice
(at least). Why positioning images doesn't work the way
everything
else does, and what you can do about it.
4. A brief tour of some of the IDL resources available to
astronomers.
Especially tools for interactive curve fitting. How to select
initial parameters. How to create and add your own fitting
models.
How to prepare your data for using these tools. Why error
estimates
are so important.
5. Five things you need to know to get more productivity out of your
time with IDL. When to use a main program, a procedure, and a
function.
How to define and use keywords to get data into and out of
your programs.
How to stop your program and examine variables and values. How
to get
the program going again. Why this is SO much better than
always changing
code itself.
--------------------------end Fanning Syllabus
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