I recently got the chance to review the book NumPy 1.5 Beginner’s Guide by Ivan Idris and published by Packt Publishing.

It covers many aspects of NumPy and also introduces SciPy as well as Matplotlib. The author includes a lot of examples and exercises and also shows the effects of some not-so-easy-to-understand functions using matplotlib graphs.

The book is easy to read, so you should make fast progress in learning NumPy. Overall, it’s a good read for NumPy beginners. Advanced NumPy users, who just want to look up how specific things work, are better of with NumPy’s documentation, though.

Since everything seems to work nicely, I’ve just uploaded the final Tea Timer 1.8 release.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to submit the new version to apple.com. Seems like they don’t accept new widgets anymore …

However, here is the list of changes for this release:

• [NEW] Growl 1.3 support
• [NEW] Pink background
• [CHANGE] Alarms are now called asynchronously. The voice and Growl message appear at the same time now (instead of after the other).
• [CHANGE] The list of alarm sounds and voices is now created dynamically and thus contain Lion’s new voices.
• [CHANGE] Editing the fields for the timer target (e.g. “Tea”) or “ready in” during a countdown will now longer reset the countdown. However, editing the countdown time during an active countdown will reset the countdown accordingly.
• [FIX] Fixed a bug with keep alarming and sticky Growl messages. You won’t get flooded by them anymore. Instead, there will be only one sticky Growl message when keep alarming is activated.

The new beta of Tea Timer 1.8 supports Growl 1.3 as well as 1.2 (if I didn’t break anything ;-))

If no further problems arise, I’ll release 1.8 final within this month.

Download Tea Timer 1.8b2