Ahhh PDFs…., or more formally, Portable Document Format files. I remember the days when I thought that PDFs were only for instruction manuals downloaded from the internet, or electronic copies of things that you don’t want people to be able to alter. Not so – I have recently discovered the joys of PDFs, particularly through […]
The title of this post is a quote from a programming course I’m taking at the moment that really made me think about things differently. In this course we’ve been doing fairly low-level programming in C, which is quite different from most of the programming I’ve been doing recently. One of my biggest lessons from […]
I remember, fairly early on in my programming career, reading Joel Spolsky’s article about interviewing for programmers. At the time I thought I might want to get a job as a programmer (in fact, I’ve now got a job in academia – albeit in a field that involves a fair amount of programming), so I […]
Summary: I’d recommend this for people interested in adding Matplotlib functionality to GUI and web applications, and for those who need a bit more information on how to do advanced plotting with Matplotlib. Most general users will be able to get the information they need from the Matplotlib website. Reference: Tosi, S., 2009, Matplotlib for […]
Since I started my PhD I have forced myself to use LaTeX for all of the documents that I write (yes, absolutely everything), and this has really helped me get to grips with how to do things in LaTeX. Overall I have been very impressed – my documents now look really professional, and LaTeX actually […]
I’ve always heard how source control should be used for every project, including those which you think are just going to be throwaway code. However, I’ve often not got around to doing this – if I write a piece of code in ten minutes, but it takes five minutes to set up a new subversion […]
I’ve recently realised something. The best place to write code isn’t in front of your computer, with your compiler, IDE and tools. The best place to write code is far, far away from any of these tools – somewhere where you can think properly. For a language with which you are fairly familiar, the mechanics […]
Summary: Very useful for reference while producing graphs, and very comprehensive (including heat-maps, 3D graphs and maps). Reference: Mittal, H. V., 2011, R Graph Cookbook, Packt Publishing, Birmingham, UK, 272 pages, Publisher’s Website As a scientist I often need to plot graphs of my data, so I am keen to learn more about how to […]
Summary: Great book – both for GIS concepts and for teaching Python libraries. Lives up to the boast on the front cover – you really will learn to create complete mapping applications, learning a lot of useful tools and techniques on the way. Reference: Westra, E., 2010, Python Geospatial Development, Packt Publishing, Birmingham, UK, 508 […]
Git is my favourite version control system (see Why is Git better than X for some good comparisons with other tools, and my GitHub repositories to see what I’ve been doing with it lately). I now use it for all of my programming projects, and many of my writing projects (as I’m now using LaTeX […]