Contents

• Lecture -1: A first program
  • Passing information into the the program - a parameter
  • Adding ``stop''
  • Adding a keyword
  • Calling a function
  
  
• Lecture 0: A ``disclaimer'' etc
• Lecture 1: Getting Started
  • So, what is IDL? What can it do for me?
  • Starting IDL.
  • A First Plot
  • Another Program
  • Resetting, compiling etc
  • Saving, restoring
  • Importing data
  • Printing your graph.
  
  
• Lecture 2: Programming in IDL
  • Variables, data types
  • Arrays
  • Flow Control
  • Array operations
  • Defining functions and procedures (and scripts)
  • A couple of exercises (using where)
  
  
• Lecture 3: Graphics (for functions of two variables)
  • Surface plots
  • Contour Plots
  • Colours in IDL
  • Maps in IDL
  • Exercise using contour plots
  
  
• Lecture 4: Images in IDL
  • Greyscale images
  • Colour images
  
  
• Other tips and tricks
  • Contours on images
  • Colorbars
  • Plotting wind vectors
  • Plotting 3D surfaces
  • Loops and how to avoid them
  • Dimensional Juggling (from David Fanning)
  • Array concatenation (from David Fanning)
  • The Histogram routine
  • Other questions
  • Further example - including plotting different data on same axes and putting text on a figure
  
  
• NetCDF (from Justin Peter)
  • Reading NetCDF (from Justin Peter)
  • and Finally ...

Abstract:

These lectures are intended to provide you with an introduction to the IDL (Interactive Data Language) scientific graphics package. They cover, in four short sessions, all that you need to know to get yourself started using IDL and to begin producing useful results. They certainly will not teach you everything that IDL can do - that would take a whole term or more. It is important to remember that learning any computing language or package is largely a matter of practice. You will not learn much by just listening to me. I can show you the sort of things that can be done and I can show you how to get started. Becoming proficient is up to you - I hope these lectures stimulate you to go away and do just that. These lectures do not assume any knowledge of IDL at all. They do assume that you are comfortable using the Sun workstations and that you can program in some procedural programming language (e.g. C, Fortran, pascal).