Bar charts with error bars are useful in engineering to show the confidence or precision in a set of measurements or calculated values. Bar charts without error bars give the illusion that a measured or calculated value is known to high precision or high confidence. In this post, we will build a bar plot using Python and matplotlib. The plot will show the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) of three different materials based on a small data set. Then we'll add error bars to this chart based on the standard deviation of the data.

Unicode characters are very useful for engineers. A couple commonly used symbols in engineers include Omega and Delta. We can print these in python using unicode characters. From the Python interpreter we can type:

>>> print('Omega: \u03A9')
Omega: Ω
>>> print('Delta: \u0394')
Delta: Δ
>>> print('sigma: \u03C3')
sigma: σ
>>> print …

In this post, I'll review creating virtual environments on three different operating systems: Windows 10, Linux and Mac OSX. Using virtual environments is good programming practice when using Python. A virtual environment will separate the Python interpreter and installed modules from the main Python installation.

This is the seventh part of a multi-part series on how I built this site. In last post, we added two new pages to our site. An About page and a Book page. In this post, we are going to deploy the site to github pages. Github pages is a place on GitHub.com were documentation and static sites can be hosted.

This is the sixth part in a multi-part series on how I built this site. In the last post, we put a search bar at the top right of each page and some css and javascript in order to make tables on the site look better. In this post we are going to add two new pages to our static site. An About page and a Book page. These new pages will have menu entries at the top of our site.