> > I can definitively second that. ROOT is a bit hard to learn but very, > > very powerful and PyRoot is really a pleasure to work with. > > It sounds interesting. Right now, I use matplotlib for > 2D plotting and vtk for 3D. Do you have any experience and > can give some recommendations?
Hi Fabian! I recommend using matplotlib for data visualization, because the usage of the plotting commands is much(!!!) more convenient. In ROOT you have to create objects before you can draw your diagrams. The constructor often requires arguments about the number of space points, axis length, name etc. On the other hand, the figure itself has a GUI to manipulate the plot, which sometimes is nicer than doing everything in the script. In particular the 3D visualization seems to be more comprehensive (lots of drawing options, rotation of the plot with the mouse, changing of visualization lego, surf, contour plots etc.). ROOT has more than plotting. For example it has a whole bunch of containers to store very large amounts of data (within complex datastructures), fitting routines, minimizers etc. But you get that with scipy and numpy. I'm using 80% of the time matplotlib because it's much quicker for quick glances at your data. If I need sophisitcated 3D plots, I use ROOT, but I would love to switch to matplotlib for this, as well. My guess is that using python and matplotlib with scipy speeds up my work by at least 30% in comparison to using purely ROOT (and code in C++). And even 10-15% in comparison to the usage of ROOT with pyRoot. Enjoy! Bernhard -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
