Learning IDL: Seeking Advice from Experienced Users

[imabug]

The new gamma cameras at work use IDL for the programming environment, which means I need to learn IDL now. Can any IDL users out there provide me with titles of some good books that will help me get up to speed with IDL?

Much appreciated.

 

[jjayjones]

Books for Learning IDL

The new gamma cameras at work use IDL for the programming environment, which means I need to learn IDL now. Can any IDL users out there provide me with titles of some good books that will help me get up to speed with IDL?

Much appreciated.

I think the most logical place to start is on ITT Visual Information Solutions' 'Books and Training Manuals' web page at URL:

http://www.ittvis.com/training/books.asp

For a text that helps you get started, there is probably no better than ITT's own tutorial-formatted manual "Introduction to IDL", which serves as the text for ITT's 3-day introductory course to IDL.

The books on ITT's web site, which were written by third parties, are all much broader in content and deeper in detail than the ITT IDL course manuals. They are also all written by consultants with many, many years of IDL programming experience and active involvement in the public IDL newsgroup. Of these the following would probably best serve as "primers" for the IDL language:

- IDL Primer by Ronn Kling
- An Introduction to Programming with IDL by Kenneth Bowman
- IDL Programming Techniques by David Fanning
- Practical IDL Programming by Liam Gumley

Hope this helps,
James Jones
ITT Technical Support