Online resources and help
When we are in IPython's pylab mode
, we can open manual pages for NumPy functions with the help command. It is not necessary to know the name of a function. We can type a few characters and then let tab completion do its work. Let's, for instance, browse the available information for the arange function.
In [2]: help ar<Tab>
In [2]: help arange
Another option is to put a question mark behind the function name:
In [3]: arange?
The main documentation website for NumPy and SciPy is at http://docs.scipy.org/doc/. Through this webpage, we can browse the NumPy reference at http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/ and the user guide as well as several tutorials.
NumPy has a wiki with lots of documentation at http://docs.scipy.org/numpy/Front%20Page/.
The NumPy and SciPy forum can be found at http://ask.scipy.org/en.
The popular Stack Overflow software development forum has hundreds of questions tagged numpy. To view them, go to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/numpy.
If you are really stuck with a problem or you want to be kept informed of NumPy development, you can subscribe to the NumPy discussion mailing list. The e-mail address is <numpy-discussion@scipy.org>. The number of e-mails per day is not too high and there is almost no spam to speak of. Most importantly, developers actively involved with NumPy also answer questions asked on the discussion group. The complete list can be found at http://www.scipy.org/Mailing_Lists.
For IRC users, there is an IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. The channel is called #scipy, but you can also ask NumPy questions since SciPy users also have knowledge of NumPy, as SciPy is based on NumPy. There are at least 50 members on the SciPy channel at all times.
