To learn IDL you can start with idl_intro.html, an on-line tutorial. A second tutorial, Using IDL for more advanced Plotting, is also available.
There is an excellent demo supplied with idl, which shows many of the advanced things IDL can do. Just type "demo" at the IDL prompt.
For tutorials of the pre-packaged iTools applications, see
idltutorials.html .
You may also want to look at the IDL supplied examples in /usr/local/rsi/idl/examples on Unix or IDL_DIR:[EXAMPLES] on VMS.
There is
web-based help on user-written routines used at PPPL.
These routines and others can be downloaded
from tar files.
There is also
web-based access to old VMS Help at PPPL. The
IDL routines from David
Fanning's class are also documented
(these should be in your default IDL path, if you use the
recommended PPPL setup).
You should also visit these valuable IDL sites, especially the ones that let you search for IDL routines written by others (no such search exists for fusion, or PPPL-specific software, but it should).