Tutorials

These tutorials illustrate the main features of Sciris. They roughly make the most sense in the order listed, but can be done in any order. Each one should take about 5 minutes to skim through, or 20-30 minutes to go through in detail. Each tutorial contains a link to an interactive version running on Binder.

These tutorials assume you are already familiar with Numpy, Matplotlib, and (recommended but not essential) pandas. If you aren’t, you’ll be much happier if you learn those first, since Sciris builds off them.

Questions? Did you complete all the tutorials and want to claim your free “I Am A Scirientist” t-shirt?† Reach out to us at info@sciris.org.

1 Whirlwind tour

A quick high-level overview of all of Sciris’ most important features.

2 Array tools

Arrays are at the core of scientific computing, and this tutorial will go through some tools that will make it easier to work with them.

3 Dictionaries and dataframes

Data are only as good as the container they’re stored in, so this tutorial goes through Sciris’ two main containers (ordered dictionaries and dataframes).

4 Files and versioning

All that data has to come from and go somewhere: this tutorial covers saving and loading files, including with version metadata.

5 Printing

This tutorial covers tools for quickly printing out information about objects and data. (As you can see, you won’t have an opportunity to make any cool plots in this tutorial, but it’s worth doing anyway, promise!)

6 Plotting

If you don’t plot it, did it even happen? This tutorial covers Sciris’ plotting tools and shortcuts that extend Matplotlib.

7 Parallelization and profiling

When you need answers faster: this tutorial covers running your code in parallel, as well as how to profile it to help find performance improvements.

8 Dates and times

Compared to nice simple numbers that behave in nice simple ways, dates can be a pain to work with. This tutorial goes through some ways to manipulate them more easily, as well as how to time parts of your code.

9 Miscellaneous utilities

Sometimes (probably often), you just need to do some random tedious task. Is there a shortcut for in Sciris? Find out here.

10 Advanced features

You probably won’t often need these tools, but we think they’re cool, and they’re here waiting for you just in case.

Full contents

• Whirlwind tour
  • Simple data operations
  • Simple data containers and plotting
  • Simple containers
  • Loading and saving
  • Parallelization
  • Putting it all together
• Math and array tools
  • Array indexing
    • Interlude on creating arrays
  • Missing values
  • Data smoothing
  • Finding a line of best fit
• Dictionaries and dataframes
  • The odict
  • The objdict
  • Dataframes
    • Dataframe creation
    • Dataframe indexing
    • Dataframe manipulation
• Files and versioning
  • Files
    • Saving and loading literally anything
    • Saving and loading JSON
    • Saving and loading YAML
    • Other file functions
  • Versioning
    • Getting version information
    • Saving and loading version information
• Printing
  • Headings and colors
  • Printing objects
  • Monitoring progress
• Plotting and colors
  • Plots
    • Basic plotting
    • Plotting styles
    • Plot configuration
    • Advanced plotting options
  • Colors
• Parallelization and profiling
  • Parallelization
    • Parallelization in Python
    • Parallelization in Sciris
    • Advanced usage
  • Profiling
    • Benchmarking
    • Line profiling
• Dates and times
  • Timing
  • Sleeping
  • Dates
• Other tools
  • Handling types
    • Converting types
    • Checking types
  • Miscellaneous tools
    • Downloading files
    • Running commands
    • Import by path
    • Getting help
• Advanced features
  • Nested dictionaries
  • Context blocks
  • Interpolation and optimization
    • Interpolation
    • Optimization
  • Animation

† There is no free t-shirt, sorry. But you made it to the end, yay!