Course software

You may use any software in the course to complete the assignments and labs. The official course software packages are either MATLAB or Python. Solutions to questions and class discussions will use either programming languange. Please note: the computer laboratories only have MATLAB installed.

Microsoft Excel is not recommended: it cannot perform some of the calculations and plots that you will require in the course, and it's accuracy is very poor (the article documents several functions that produce incorrect results).

About MATLAB

We should be familiar with MATLAB, based on previous courses. MATLAB is available in the computer labs, and a student edition is also available for purchase at the bookstore, for $112.95, or on-line at http://mathworks.com

About Python

You might not be familiar with Python. Here is a comparison with MATLAB:

• Many companies already use it as a standard package now
• It can run on Windows, Linux and Mac computers (companies are increasingly using Mac and Linux platforms)
• Commercial software support is available from 3rd parties
• The software can be installed on a local desktop, or in a networked environment and run remotely
• It is free (both for academic and commercial use), so it can used after you graduate
• Installation is straightforward
• The license is not restrictive: you can legally modify and improve the software
• There are excellent add-on libraries for almost anything related to data analysis
• It promotes good practice of writing a code file, and then running it (like MATLAB). The code file documents what you have done, and you can always repeat your analysis on a new data set, or share the code with colleagues. Other software packages tend to promote a more point-and-click approach, so you can't always retrace your steps.
• There are multicore and 64-bit versions of Python available to process large data sets, and do parallel data processing

Python installation instructions (specific to this course)

Here are some instructions for Windows-users that want to use Python for the course. Linux and Mac users - Python is already installed with your operating system, however, please speak to me and I can help you customize it, as required for this course.

Python is an open source software. Because of this, various groups have "packaged" the official Python distribution to meet certain needs. For example:

• The official (reference) Python distribution: http://python.org
• Enthought Python distribution: http://www.enthought.com/epd
• IronPython: http://ironpython.net/
• JPython: http://www.jython.org/

However, for this course, we will use the Python version as distributed from http://www.pythonxy.com/, and called Python(X,Y).

Feature	Install Python
Official website	http://code.google.com/p/pythonxy/
Latest version	2.6.5.3
Official download page	Link
Faster download link	From McMaster webserver [455 Mb]