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1.1 Availability

The complete NCO source distribution is currently distributed as a compressed tarfile from http://sf.net/projects/nco and from http://dust.ess.uci.edu/nco/nco.tar.gz. The compressed tarfile must be uncompressed and untarred before building NCO. Uncompress the file with ‘gunzip nco.tar.gz’. Extract the source files from the resulting tarfile with ‘tar -xvf nco.tar’. GNU tar lets you perform both operations in one step with ‘tar -xvzf nco.tar.gz’.

The documentation for NCO is called the NCO User's Guide. The User's Guide is available in Postscript, HTML, DVI, TeXinfo, and Info formats. These formats are included in the source distribution in the files nco.ps, nco.html, nco.dvi, nco.texi, and nco.info*, respectively. All the documentation descends from a single source file, nco.texi 1. Hence the documentation in every format is very similar. However, some of the complex mathematical expressions needed to describe ncwa can only be displayed in DVI, Postscript, and PDF formats.

A complete list of papers and publications on/about NCO is available on the NCO homepage. Most of these are freely available. The primary refereed publications are fxm ZeM06 and fxm Zen07. These contain copyright restrictions which limit their redistribution, but they are freely available in preprint form from the NCO.

If you want to quickly see what the latest improvements in NCO are (without downloading the entire source distribution), visit the NCO homepage at http://nco.sf.net. The HTML version of the User's Guide is also available online through the World Wide Web at URL http://nco.sf.net/nco.html. To build and use NCO, you must have netCDF installed. The netCDF homepage is http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf.

New NCO releases are announced on the netCDF list and on the nco-announce mailing list http://lists.sf.net/mailman/listinfo/nco-announce.


Footnotes

[1] To produce these formats, nco.texi was simply run through the freely available programs texi2dvi, dvips, texi2html, and makeinfo. Due to a bug in TeX, the resulting Postscript file, nco.ps, contains the Table of Contents as the final pages. Thus if you print nco.ps, remember to insert the Table of Contents after the cover sheet before you staple the manual.