I have a book!

I just got notification that my first book, co-authored with Sigal Gottlieb and Chi-Wang Shu, is finally available for pre-order and will ship by the end of the month.  The book is on strong stability preserving methods (the only existing book on the subject) and is, I think, a nice introduction to the subject.  You can read more about it here.  Apparently it has already sold almost 100 copies.  If you do order a copy, you can get a 20% discount until March with the code "DCL032011".

nodepy 0.3 available via easy_install

To facilitate my research and perhaps help someone else out there, I develop a python package based around numerical ODE solvers (Runge-Kutta methods, multistep methods, etc.) as objects. The package is called nodepy, and has somewhat limited functionality. However, it contains a very nice implementation of rooted trees, including the ability to compute all the things necessary for deriving order conditions of general linear methods. It also has a lot of nice functionality for Runge-Kutta methods, including a lot of things related to low-storage methods and embedded methods.

As of today, the package is finally available on the PyPI server, and therefore can be installed using

easy_install nodepy

Hopefully this will encourage interested parties to try it out (or better yet, to contribute!)

Using pylint to clean up Python code

I just recently discovered a very useful package for anyone who writes python code: pylint. It took a little tweaking to get it to do what I wanted. Besides looking for outright errors, it checks all the recommended Python coding style conventions. Since I don't abide by many of those, pylint gave my nodepy code a rating of -4.5/10.0 (yes, that's a NEGATIVE rating) initially. More importantly, I couldn't find the real errors among the thousands of style complaints. To run pylint without checking all the style conventions, just type

pylint -d C xxxx

where "xxxx" is the name of a python package or module. It will still make a lot of subjective judgments about your code (like suggesting that no function should have more than 5 arguments), but to me it's a tolerable level (and sometimes the suggestions really are helpful). More information about pylint's output messages can be found here: http://www.logilab.org/card/pylintfeatures. I was able to uncover several previously unnoticed issues in my package in this way.