Lectures, 2005. — 15 p.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).Getting Started.
So, what is IDL? What can it do for me?
Starting IDL.
A First Plot.
Importing data.
Printing your graph.
Programming in IDL.
Variables, data types.
Flow Control.
Array operations.
Defining functions and procedures.
More graphics.
Surface plots.
Contour Plots.
Colours in IDL.
Maps in IDL.
Images in IDL.
Greyscale images.
Colour images.
