Mastering Numerical Computing with NumPy

Basics of NumPy array objects

As mentioned in the preceding section, what makes NumPy special is the usage of multidimensional arrays called ndarrays. All ndarray items are homogeneous and use the same size in memory. Let's start by importing NumPy and analyzing the structure of a NumPy array object by creating the array. You can easily import this library by typing the following statement into your console. You can use any naming convention instead of np, but in this book, np will be used as it's the standard convention. Let's create a simple array and explain what the attributes hold by Python behind the scenes as metadata of the created array, so-called attributes:

In [2]: import numpy as np        x = np.array([[1,2,3],[4,5,6]])        xOut[2]: array([[1, ...