Title: Don't waste your money
Product review: I can only assume that the reason this book got so many good reviews is because for so long it was the only book out there on IDL: and compared to learning IDL from the computer manuals anything seems good.My complaints: The author continually introduces extraneous commands into his examples just to show off what IDL can do. He does not explain where these extra bells and whistles come from, and so gives the impression that IDL is FAR MORE ARBITRARY than necessary. This is annoying to say the least, but also makes it difficult to learn the lanquage when you can't understand the complete example. The chapter on color is especially nightmarish: a plethora of commands with very little complete explanation. Programming by rote....
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