I have only experimented with Python a little bit. If you are at PPPL, you can try it yourself by looking at: pppl-specific info . (Otherwise, download your own copy from the following sites.)
The Official Python Language Web Site is the main place to start. In particular see the main Python docs.
Old:
The official Numerical Python web site, includes a nice tutorial.
New: Numerical Python is now subsumed into
SciPy, a package for Scientific Computing With Python.
(You have to install the base Python package first, Numerical Python is an
extension to it.)
The official Numerical Python web site used to be sponsored by LLNL at http://xfiles.llnl.gov/python.html, but that link no longer works. However, you can still find the the last official LLNL version from January 2000, before it moved to sourceforge.net.
NumPy discussion list and archives.
Broken link: The original Numerical Python still has some concise docs.
Python and Scientific Computing.
Python wrapper to FFTW (now a part of SciPy), and other useful python stuff.
Documentation for a standard numerical Python installation at
the
European Space Agency collaboration with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Python has interfaces to several
scientific graphics and GUI packages, including gnuplot, pgplot, and
the Gist package described below.
Gist is an excellent set of scientific graphics packages developed at
LLNL, originally for
Yorick but now
also with an interface to Python. Here is
detailed documentation on the PyGist graphics package (or tar file of
the same documentation ), including
EZPLOT, an Object-Oriented graphics package, and the straight Python-Gist
interface. Once Gist is installed, you can also get help on it by starting
up Python, do "from gist import *", and then do 'help("gist")' to get lots
of on-line documentation on any subtopic for gist.
These Gist-based graphics packages (alonge with Narcisse, a graphics
package developed by LLNL's sister lab in France) have been separated out
from the present releases of Numerical Python but are still available in an
earlier LLNL distribution of Numerical Python. These probably still
work in the present version of Numerical Python, but the keeper of Gist,
Zane Motteler, is retiring and has appealed for a new caretaker (Lee Busby
may be able to help occasionally)... The Python graphics package used at
LLNL for climate modeling is soon to be released. There are also lots of
other choices listed at the "scientifc graphics and GUI packages" link
above.
Broken link
: Gist (a good
graphics package for Yorick and for Python),
(instead see the above links for Yorick and Python versions of Gist).
Eric Jones in his
tutorial at the 2001 Python 9 conference recommended plt as a
scientific graphics package:
VPython
offers a real-time 3-D interface usable by novices...
A concise tutorial on Numerical Python.
A more detailed
reference on Numerical Python.
Tutorials
and useful Scientific packages (netCDF interface, ascii data utilities,
statistics, gnuplot interface, molecular modeling).
Brief intro to the interface to the Tk package (for easily building
GUI's).
Graphics in Python
For more tutorials on Numerical Python, see: