1.2) What Can You Do With Python?
With Python, you can carry out so many tasks with ease that this might be the only language/tool you ever need to learn. Here are some examples of Python usage:
- Use it as a calculator for simple to more complex arithmetic operations, scalar and array calculations
- Write scripts (bash-style) to process, manage and read/write files, perform repetitive tasks or even run your model
- Read/write and process many types of data formats: text, databases, arrays and complex data (HDF5, NetCDF), geospacial data, images...
- Perform scientific computations with arrays as you would with Fortran, Matlab, IDL, R or Excel
- Analyse and process images (e.g. with scikit-image http://scikit-image.org/)
- Use tools from specialised packages and plot the results, all within Python
- Plot your results and produce publication quality figures with matplotlib and other packages. Produce 3D plots, animations, maps and other plots
- Document and share your research alongside your code and results with the IPython Notebook for ultimate science reproducibility
- Link to other software packages (R, ArcGIS,FREEQC...) and other programming languages (Fortran, C) to re-use and build on previous work