On Friday 16 Apr 2010 11:10:20 P Kishor wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 2:50 AM, Matthew Kenworthy
> 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > rescale2d is what you're looking for:
> Wow! Seriously, I didn't even expect this to be a function! Very many
> thanks.
> 
> Two thoughts occur to me --
> 
> 1. How would I have even begun to discover rescale2d?
> 
> 2. You know what PDL needs? It needs a book very much like either the
> "Perl Cookbook" (call this the "PDL Cookbook") or even better, it
> needs an analog of the wolf book
> <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781565923980>. I would have hours and
> hours of fun reading if I had a "Mastering algorithms with PDL". One
> (or more) of you brainiacs should seriously consider writing one. I
> will happily put down my advance payment.
> 

I think a PDL Cookbook would be a great idea. PDL and similar numerical 
packages (e.g: Matlab, SciPy/NumPy/etc., GNU octave, Scilab and many others I 
forgot) have many dark corners. Despite the fact that back when I studied 
Elec. Eng. in the university, I've written much better Matlab than many of my 
fellow students who just used explicit loops, I still feel I'm missing a lot 
and often resort to use loop instead of more succinct (and likely faster) 
code.

That put aside, assuming some people will undertake the mission to write such 
a book, I would heavily recommend for making a copy of it available online for 
viewing, linking, searching using search engines, download, comments and 
scrutiny. As I noted here:

http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/philosophy/closed-books-are-so-19th-
century/

(short URL - http://xrl.us/bewvc7 ).

I should note that if someone is going to write a manuscript for that he'll 
have a hard time convincing a publication to publish it because PDL is far too 
niche, and has a very small market share (unfortunately), and so one cannot 
expect a lot of sales, in any case. 

We can start an effort to do a book like this on a wiki such as:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/pdl/index.php?title=Main_Page

(Though the URL is not very friendly.)

I wouldn't mind contributing some tricks I've experimented with (I have a 
Mandelbrot Set program in Matlab that I can translate to PDL, for example), 
but the usual caveat is that I have many other things I'm doing at the moment.

Regards,

        Shlomi Fish

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