daviddoji/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Python
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Improved instructions for installation and reading

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The old version incorrectly stated that the book had better
instructions. It does not. Besides, the instructions do belong
here.
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Roger Labbe 2014-09-18 14:10:42 -07:00
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@ -26,11 +26,16 @@ The github pages for this project are at https://github.com/rlabbe/Kalman-and-Ba
git clone https://github.com/rlabbe/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Python.git
Navigate to the directory, and run IPython notebook with the command
git clone http://rlabbe.github.io/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Python/
This will create a directory named Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Python. Navigate to the directory, and run IPython notebook with the command
ipython notebook
If you need more instructions they are available in the static version of the book. Follow the link above, and read the installation appendix.
This will open a browswer window showing the contents of the base directory. The book is organized into chapters. To read Chapter 2, click on the link for chapter 2. This will cause the browwer to open that subdirectory. In each subdirectory there will be one or more IPython Notebooks (all notebooks have a .ipynb file extension). The chapter contents are in the notebook with the same name as the chapter name. There are sometimes supporting notebooks for doing things like generating animations that are displayed in the chapter. These are not intended to be read by the end user, but of course if you are curious as to how an animation is made go ahead and take a look.
This is admittedly a somewhat cumbersome interface to a book; I am following in the footsteps of several other projects that are somewhat repurposing IPython Notebook to generate entire books. I feel the slight annoyances have a huge payoff - instead of having to download a separate code base and run it in an IDE while you try to read a book, all of the code and text is in one place. If you want to alter the code, you may do so and immediately see the effects of your change. If you find a bug, you can make a fix, and push it back to my repository so that everyone in the world benefits. And, of course, you will never encounter a problem I face all the time with traditional books - the book and the code are out of sync with each other, and you are left scratching your head as to which source to trust.
@ -167,9 +172,12 @@ Symbols and notations used in this book. Comparison with notations used in the l
Installation and Software Requirements
-----
** author's note**. *The book is still being written, and so I am not focusing on issues like supporting multipe versions of Python. I am staying more or less on the bleeding edge of Python 3 for the time being. If you follow my suggestion of installing Anaconda all off the versioning problems will be taken care of for you, and you will not alter or affect any existing installation of Python on your machine. I am aware that telling somebody to install a specific packaging system is not a long term solution, but I can either focus on endless regression testing for every minor code change, or work on delivering the book, and then doing one sweep through it to maximize compatibility. I opt for the latter. In the meantime I welcome bug reports if the book does not work on your platform.*
If you want to run the notebook on your computer, which is what I recommend, then you will have to have IPython installed. I do not cover how to do that in this book; requirements change based on what other python installations you may have, whether you use a third party package like Anaconda Python, what operating system you are using, and so on.
To use all features you will have to have Ipython 2.0 installed, which is released and stable as of April 2014. Most of the book does not require that, but I do make use of the interactive plotting widgets introduced in this release. A few cells will not run if you have an older version installed.
To use all features you will have to have Ipython 2.0 installed, which is released and stable as of April 2014. Most of the book does not require that recent of a version, but I do make use of the interactive plotting widgets introduced in this release. A few cells will not run if you have an older version installed. This is merely a minor annoyance.
You will need Python 2.7 or later installed. Almost all of my work is done in Python 3.4, but I periodically test on 2.7. I do not promise any specific check in will work in 2.7 however. I do use Python's "from __future__ import ..." statement to help with compatibility. For example, all prints need to use parenthesis. If you try to add, say, "print 3.14" into the book your script will fail; you must write "print (3.4)" as in Python 3.X.