Gumley Liam E. Practical IDL Programming

Morgan Kaufmann, 2001. — 511 p.This book provides a solid foundation in the fundamentals of programming in Interactive Data Language (IDL), an array-oriented data analysis and visualization environment developed and marketed by Research Systems, Incorporated (RSI) of Boulder, Colorado. IDL is available for Windows, MacOS, Unix (including Linux), and VMS platforms.
The first version of IDL for VAX/VMS was released in 1981 by RSI founder David Stern. Since then, IDL has emerged from its roots in the astronomical and space sciences to become a widely used tool in research, educational, and commercial settings in areas as diverse as the earth sciences, medical physics, and engineering test and analysis. Examples of real-world tasks where IDL is used include analyzing and visualizing images from the Hubble Space Telescope; rendering threedimensional volumes of the human body from magnetic resonance imaging; and monitoring and controlling the plasma field of a nuclear fusion tokamak.
The long-term success of IDL stems from its flexible modes of operation, which include rapid interactive analysis and visualization; a powerful programming environment; and fully developed cross-platform enduser applications that range from an advanced remote sensing image processing suite (ENVI) to a comprehensive terrain and river network analysis package (RiverTools). In addition, IDL offers a broad range of fundamental data types, making it possible to read almost any input data format. The availability of IDL on all major Unix platforms (including Linux), Windows, and MacOS facilitates data analysis in multiplatform environments and ensures that applications developed on one platform can be successfully ported to new platforms when hardware changes are necessary. Finally, the worldwide community of IDL users contributes to and maintains a collection of freely available Internet-based libraries, which at the time of writing included over 5,000 separate routines.