1. Preface

1.1. What is in this handbook ?

This book includes the following chapters:

• Chapter Introduction gives a general overview of the DANA computing framework
• Chapter Installation explains how to install DANA on your machine.
• Chapter Quick tour gives a rapid overview of main concepts related to DANA.
• Chapter From numpy array to dana group explains conceptual differences between array and group.
• Chapter Model and equations explains what are model and equations and how to use them.
• Chapter Connections gives details on group connections
• Chapter Learning gives main concepts related to learning
• Chapter Life and Death explains what are dead units and dead connections
• Chapter Time details time management and timers
• Chapter Advanced concepts introduces advanced dana concepts
• Chapter Examples comments on examples from various scientific domain.
• Chapter Application Programming Interface Application Programming Interface
• Chapter Frequently asked questions gives answers to frequently asked questions
• Chapter Glossary explains terms used in this book
• Chapter GNU Free Documentation License explains what you can and cannot do with this book.

1.2. Who should read this book ?

You should read this book if you intent to develop models using the DANA computing framework and especially if your models belong to the computational neuroscience domain. DANA is a python library and depends heavily on external library such as numpy and scipy. However, this book does not provide a tutorial to the python language neither an introduction to the numpy/scipy libraries. If you’re unfamiliar with both of them, you’encouraged to document yourself first by considering external resources for both python, numpy and scipy.

If you’re unfamiliar with python, have a look first at the very nice tutorial by Mark Pilgrim (which is also available as a book). Numpy user guide should gives you the main concepts related to vectorized computation while scipy tutorial may be considered optional but worth reading anyway.

Python

• Python website : http://www.python.org
• Python tutorial: http://diveintopython.org

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Numpy

• Numpy website: http://numpy.scipy.org
• Numpy tutorial: http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/user/
• Numpy manual: http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/

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Scipy

• SciPy website: http://www.scipy.org
• SciPy tutorial: http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/tutorial/index.html
• SciPy manual: http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference

1.3. Conventions used in this book

A lot of examples are given throughout the book and the may be related to either a regular shell, a python shell or an ipython shell. You can easily distinguish them by the prompt they use:

System shell:

$

Python/IPython shell:

>>>

Furthemore, since numpy, scipy and matplotlib libraries are extensively used throughout the whole book, they will respectively referred as np, sp, and plt and are supposed to have been imported as:

>>> import numpy as np
>>> import scipy as sp
>>> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

1.4. About this book

This book has been written using Sphinx and was last generated on February 14, 2012.