IDL Resources

Slug's Guide to IDL: A great collection of resources compiled by UC Santa Cruz grad students. A few highlights:

• Carl Heiles's Quick IDL Tutorial #1: A great starting place for beginners.
• Carl Heiles's Quick IDL Tutorial #2: IDL Datatypes and Organizational Structures
• Adding programs to your IDL path
• The where() function
• Reading ASCII data (text files)
• Reading FITS images

Plotting examples with the new "object graphics" method

IDL Astronomy User's Library: The best thing about IDL is the huge astronomy codebase. If you think it has already been done, it probably has: don't reinvent the wheel! This is a good place to start looking.

The IDL Coyote, aka David Fanning, will surely show up in many of your Google searches. His website has lots of great question & answer archives, tips, and a code library. The Coyote has a specific page on object graphics. 

NumPy for IDL users: Useful mapping between IDL and Python if you use code written in both languages