Guides are comprehensive, conceptually-focused documents providing stand-alone introductions to core packages in addition to the underlying astronomical concepts.
Tutorials are step-by-step cookbooks for common activities that incorporate several packages. They are more specific and less conceptual than Guides but more extended than Examples.
Documentation is the complete description of a package with all requisite details, including usage, dependencies, and examples.
Examples are stand-alone code snippets that live in the astropy documentation that demonstrate a specific functionality within a package.
Astropy is a Python library for use in astronomy. Learn Astropy provides a portal to all of the Astropy educational material through a single dynamically searchable web page. It allows you to filter tutorials by keywords, search for filters, and make search queries in tutorials and documentation simultaneously.
The Anaconda Python Distribution includes Astropy and is the recommended way to install both Python and the Astropy package. Once you have Anaconda installed, use the following to update to the latest version of Astropy:
conda update astropy
To install Astropy from the source into an existing Python installation, see the more detailed installation instructions in the main Astropy documentation.
If you have any questions regarding using Astropy there are numerous channels for communication. Post to any one of several forums to get help from our active, helpful, and friendly community of users and developers.
We welcome feedback, improvements, and new tutorial content via the Astropy Tutorials Repository on GitHub. If you find a typo or would like to clarify some text, please either create an issue or make the change yourself and then submit a pull request directly to the repository. Questions and/or comments about the tutorials are welcome on the astropy-dev mailing list. For more information, please see the contributing documentation:
See the developer documentation: Documentation on tutorials infrastructure.