Data analysis advice

Some tips for your data analysis: 

• The order of the dimensions of data cubes contained in the HDF5 files can be different depending on the language (IDL/python/...) you use to load the data. For instance, the z dimension can end be up as first dimension ([z,xy,]). 
• When developing your analysis routines, check that everything looks reasonable after any (major) step. Plot maps, print out values and see if that looks ok. 
• Avoid hard-coding numbers and make it flexible enough. Typically you will have to run your routines multiple times. Hard-coding makes it difficult to adjust code and is prone to errors (e.g., forgetting to change it somewhere...). 
• Add a lot of meaningful comments to your code. Your future you will thank you. :-)