Installing python and nice lectures on scientific Python.

Since more than one year without any message!... And the new one is almost nothing from me, just links to good pages.

Two easy ways to install python+ipython+numpy+matplotlib+scipy:

Anaconda from continuum (but only 64bit version for OSX, which can be a problem for MySQLdb):
Ask for the academic licence if you can.
http://continuum.io/
Once installed, you will need to add the anaconda/bin directory to your PATH and the anaconda directory to your PYTHONPATH.

Canopy from Entought:
https://www.enthought.com/products/canopy/
Once installed, you must setup the virtual environment by adding to your .tcshrc:
setenv VIRTUAL_ENV /Users/YOURNAME/Library/Enthought/Canopy_32bit/User
setenv PATH  $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin:$PATH

!!! Warning !!! When using this virtual environment, don't install using pip with the --user option. Install directly, as for example:
pip install pyfits

UPDATE: Another (better) package comes from STSCI, it's UREKA: http://ssb.stsci.edu/ureka/

Here follows good pages to learn python. Those pages are made using Notebook, which is very efficient to show/share python programs.

Here are the links:

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/jrjohansson/scientific-python-lectures/master/Lecture-0-Scientific-Computing-with-Python.ipynb
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/jrjohansson/scientific-python-lectures/master/Lecture-1-Introduction-to-Python-Programming.ipynb
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/jrjohansson/scientific-python-lectures/master/Lecture-2-Numpy.ipynb
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/jrjohansson/scientific-python-lectures/master/Lecture-3-Scipy.ipynb
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/jrjohansson/scientific-python-lectures/master/Lecture-4-Matplotlib.ipynb
http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/jrjohansson/scientific-python-lectures/master/Lecture-6B-HPC.ipynb