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New book about programming Igor
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MSchmid
I got the feeling that many people actually had problems with programming Igor and so I decided to write a little book about it.
It is now available on Amazon.
I tried to write the book from a more general perspective (I used C/C++ and Python in the past) and discussed things like code encapsulation, graphical user interfaces, or regular expressions on a beginners level (some people are completely unaware that Igor even supports concepts like regular expressions and the like).
And several new (and nice) features of Igor 7 are mentioned as well.
May 10, 2018 at 08:03 am - Permalink
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J. J. Weimer
Chemistry / Chemical & Materials Engineering, UAH
May 10, 2018 at 10:41 am - Permalink
I too have order a copy and look forward to it.
Maybe we should form a book club ;)
Andy
May 10, 2018 at 01:32 pm - Permalink
May 11, 2018 at 02:29 am - Permalink
@MSchimd: I've sent my longer feedback to the email provided in the book.
May 11, 2018 at 07:27 am - Permalink
May 12, 2018 at 01:57 am - Permalink
I got the book and read it over the weekend. Very nice. I even learned/appreciated a thing or two.
I will provide some additional feedback directly.
I think there is an opportunity to have a discussion as how to teach getting the most out of Igor Pro when the target user is most likely a scientist/engineer as their day job and need a tool to get things done. This is in contrast to programmers as the primary audience for some other programs/languages.
The hybrid interface is a unique feature which I use often in doing ad hoc analysis. Also I find myself creating a user interface even for myself when I am exploring data, something again Igor Pro does so very well. So I think there may be common workflows that could act as teaching method to bring the new user up the learning curve faster.
Andy
May 13, 2018 at 07:52 pm - Permalink
I updated the book when Igor 8 was released and included another example that shows how to do a curve fit with a neural network. Because I think neural networks are awesome, I list this example below, so that also everyone with an older version of the book can see it.
Run this module with
The parameter 150 is the number of training sets for the NN which works best. Note that getting the number of training sets and learning rate right can be a bit finicky. Play around yourself.
June 1, 2018 at 06:06 am - Permalink
Just bought one for the lab, that's going to help new users.
July 30, 2018 at 07:31 pm - Permalink