IDL Essentials Training Course

IDL Essentials is a three-day course for those who want a comprehensive overview of IDL functionality, programming, and graphics techniques. The course concentrates on those basic programming and graphics display techniques that are required in almost every IDL program. Attention is given to reading, analyzing, and displaying your data both on the display and in hardcopy output. The course is suitable for those just starting to learn IDL or for those who want to expand their IDL programming repertoire by learning new tricks and techniques.

Each course is tailored specifically to the interests and abilities of the course participants. Feel free to bring your own data to use in the various examples and programming exercises. Each course participant receives a PDF copy of my IDL programming manual, IDL Programming Techniques.

IDL Essentials Overview

• Setting up the IDL Environment
  • Configuring the IDL Workbench
  • Setting up IDL projects
  • Managing IDL preferences
• Understanding Color in IDL
  • Indexed verses decomposed color
  • How to use color in IDL graphics commands
  • How the different graphics systems use color
  • How to set up and use color tables and color bars
• Graphical Display of Data
  • Line, surface, and contour plots
  • Image display and manipulations
  • Drawing lines, symbols, and text
  • Output to PostScript, PDF, and raster file formats
• Reading and Writing Data
  • General file input and output in IDL, both ASCII and binary
  • Reading and writing standard image formats (PNG, TIFF, JPEG, etc.)
  • Working with scientific data formats (netCDF, HDF, etc.)
• Introduction to IDL Programming
  • Differences between procedures and functions and when to use each
  • Defining and using positional and keyword parameters
  • Using IDL program control structures (FOR loop, IF-THEN-ELSE, etc.)
  • Ways of handling program errors
  • Introducton to memory management and handling large data sets
  • Techniques of program debugging
  • Introduction to pointers, objects, lists, and hashes
  • Program documentation using IDLDOC

Skills Required:

• Basic operating knowledge of computers required.
• Knowledge of some (not necessarily IDL) computer language helpful.