============
Introduction
============

.. contents::

Mango is a collection of 3D MPI-distributed image processing filters.

This tutorial will acquaint the first-time user of Mango with some of its
features. It assumes that the user has already installed the Mango
package. Some general Python facility is also assumed.
acquired by working through the Python distribution's Tutorial.

For brevity and convenience, we will often assume that the main
package (mango) has been imported as::

    >>> import mango

Mango Organization
--------------------

Mango is organised into sub-packages covering different functionality.

.. currentmodule:: mango

==================  ======================================================
Sub-package         Description
==================  ======================================================
:mod:`core`         Fundamental MPI distributed data structures and functions.
:mod:`io`           Input/Output
:mod:`image`        Image processing filters.
:mod:`mpi`          Message Passing Interface parallelism.
:mod:`data`         Functions/classes for generating synthetic images.
==================  ======================================================

Python's documentation strings are used in Mango for on-line
documentation. There are two methods for reading them and
getting help. One is Python's command :func:`help` in the :obj:`pydoc`
module. Entering this command with no arguments (i.e. ``>>> help`` )
launches an interactive help session that allows searching through the
keywords and modules available to all of Python. Secondly, running the command
`help(obj)` with an object as the argument displays that object's calling
signature, and documentation string.

Another useful command is :func:`inspect.getsource`. When given a function
written in Python as an argument, it prints out a listing of the
source code for that function. This can be helpful in learning about
an algorithm or understanding exactly what a function is doing with
its arguments. Also don't forget about the Python command :func:`dir`
which can be used to look at the namespace of a module or package.