Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

docs questions from new user #2909

Closed
7 of 12 tasks
dcherian opened this issue Apr 19, 2019 · 2 comments
Closed
7 of 12 tasks

docs questions from new user #2909

dcherian opened this issue Apr 19, 2019 · 2 comments

Comments

@dcherian
Copy link
Contributor

dcherian commented Apr 19, 2019

A relatively new user here gave me an incomplete list of things they found to be confusing in the docs:

  • What is xarray's data model? opened Document xarray data model #2913

  • What is split-apply-combine?

  • What are dummy dimensions and np.newaxis

  • quick-overiew: Index so that you extract a subset!

  • too many references to pandas!

  • do I need to know pandas to use xarray?

  • what is the difference between attrs and encoding? How do I use them properly/correctly?

  • why isnull and dropna: why dropna instead of dropnull

  • compute docstring doesn't mention computation!

  • compute vs persist vs load: what's the difference

  • do I get parallelization for free?

    • do I start a dask cluster first?
    • dask page links to shoyers blog but that doesn't explicitly start a cluster.

I'm crossing out things that I've started to fix.

@fmaussion
Copy link
Member

too many references to pandas!

This is a tricky one. In the beginning we wanted people to come from pandas to xarray. It was kind of assumed that everybody uses and loves pandas, therefore will also use and love xarray. (my own experience).

But do we have to build the docs for non-pandas users as well? It could make quite a few things redundant with the pandas documentation...

@TomNicholas
Copy link
Member

But do we have to build the docs for non-pandas users as well? It could make quite a few things redundant with the pandas documentation...

I personally think we should. I think there are a very large number of numpy users who don't use pandas or any labelled data libraries at all, who cannot be assumed to know what Pandas does. I definitely didn't understand what the references to Pandas meant when I first read xarray's documentation, and everyone else in my field seems to fit in this category at least...

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

3 participants