Software

To work on all these techniques and projects (and of course this website) required a lot of software. Some of these I had been using for many years or even decades. Others were completely new to me but necessary to do all this work. While the learning experience is still relatively new for me, I thought it might be useful to some visitors to this site to describe the software I’ve been using and why. Some of you may want to develop your own stuff and if I can save you time, that would be a very good thing.

Most of the software I’ve been using has been completely free of charge and often open-source. However, most of the developers do appreciate a donation, so don’t forget this if you like using their products. All the software packages listed here I have used extensively and I feel that they are excellent for the tasks I got them for and I recommend them thoroughly. However, it’s not a perfect world and so in each of the following mini-reviews, I will give a few ‘pros and cons’ that may help the reader in making decisions. There may of course be better products out there but I’ve tried many of them and the software I’ve chosen to use seemed to be the best for my purposes.

Note that these will be fairly short reviews with an example or two and a summary of my overall thoughts on each. Note that I do not plan to use this platform as a training course for any of the software packages listed but I will point to some websites, books and other resources that helped me to learn how to use them.

As with other parts of the website, I intend to populate this section incrementally. So, even though I list all the software I intend to cover in the Contents list above, not all reviews will be active initially but you should see the list grow.

As always, feedback would be most welcome. 

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