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Overview


Learning Goals

This course is intended to provide you with a brief introduction to the IDL (Interactive Data Language) programming language. This course covers the basics of what you need to know in order to get yourself started using IDL and to begin producing some useful results. You will also learn how to write procedures and functions to make your code more efficient.

Course Structure

  • Basic variable types and mathematical operators
  • Using the IDL help system in order to learn more about the built-in functions and procedures
  • Creating variable definitions and the use of arrays and structures
  • Plotting data on a simple line graph
  • Using conditional statements and loops
  • Defining procedures and functions and using keywords
  • Writing procedures to read in ASCII and binary data
  • Creating 2D contour plots and saving the output

Glossary

A glossary is available that lists the commonly used terms and commands.