| Re: Who have an electrical book of IDL in English? [message #52193 is a reply to message #52096] |
Mon, 15 January 2007 09:11   |
JD Smith
Messages: 850
Registered: December 1999
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Senior Member |
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On Fri, 12 Jan 2007 10:24:17 -0500, Ben Tupper wrote:
> David Fanning wrote:
>> tianyf@gmail.com writes:
>>
>>> I think you should really learn the most things from IDL's online help
>>> documents. They are designed for beginners, with a lot of examples. Try
>>> them, and you will learn a lot.
>>
>> I don't doubt you will learn a lot. Whether that's the
>> *best* way to learn IDL or not, I'm not so sure. I know
>> when I was first learning IDL I had to read the User's
>> Guide front to back twice before I could figure out how
>> to draw a line plot. Things have improved a lot since
>> then, but not so much "use the on-line help" would be
>> my first recommendation for learning to write IDL programs. :-)
>>
>
> Speaking of online help...
>
> You may recall that long ago Andrew Cool and I fussed with an online
> help system for IDL 5.5 that used IDLWAVE resources to get around the
> PDF help system that was then provided with IDL.
>
> Imagine my surprise this week when I accidentally type ...
>
> IDL> xdl
>
>
> What the heck?!?
>
> Digging a little deeper I have found that...
>
> IDL> xdl, /no_block
>
> while not pretty, is pretty handy. That said, I think the new online
> help system, regardless of what I might think of the contents, is very good.
That seems to parse the doc header of all !DIR/.pro routines, but
doesn't display internal routines (e.g. widget_control). My old
IDLWAVE stuff actually parsed the old PDF docs into HTML, trimming all
the cruft, and attempting to format it readably, while skimming off
routine information (calling sequence, keywords, etc.) and creating
links. It was a hack, which luckily isn't needed anymore, since
RSI/ITTVIS is good enough to ship with each an every IDL copy an XML
catalog of their new improved HTML help system.
The way I avoid two monitors: simply summon context help as needed
directly from the text in IDLWAVE with M-?. The IDL Assistant pops up
with the exact topic/keyword/class/routine/sysvar/control
structure/etc all queued up. Then I minimize the window and continue
on.
I probably invoke C-c ? (routine info, usually to recall the
quasi-random calling syntax and get argument order right) once every
1min, and M-? (context help) every 5min. They, to me, are the
"killer features" of IDLWAVE. When I program in other languages, like
Perl, I really miss that functionality.
JD
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