Sep 23-24, 2015
9:00 am - 5:00 pm
Instructors: Jonathan Guyer, Dilip Banerjee, William Krekelberg, Joshua Ryan Smith
Helpers: Marcus Mendenhall, Zachary Trautt, Chandler Becker, Raymond Plante, Nana Ofori Opoku
Software Carpentry's mission is to help scientists and engineers get more research done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic lab skills for scientific computing. This hands-on workshop will cover basic concepts and tools, including program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.
For more information on what we teach and why, please see our paper "Best Practices for Scientific Computing".
Who: The course is aimed at graduate students and other researchers.
Where: LR-A, 100 Bureau Dr., Gaithersburg, MD 20899. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.
Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a few specific software packages installed (listed below). They are also required to abide by Software Carpentry's Code of Conduct.
Contact: Please mail guyer@nist.gov for more information.
09:00 | Automating tasks with the Unix shell - lecture notes |
10:30 | Coffee |
12:00 | Lunch break |
13:00 | Building programs with Python - lecture notes |
14:30 | Coffee |
16:00 | Wrap-up |
09:00 | Version control with Git - lecture notes |
10:30 | Coffee |
12:00 | Lunch break |
13:00 | Managing data with SQL |
14:30 | Coffee |
16:00 | Wrap-up |
Etherpad: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/2015-09-23-nist.
We will use this Etherpad for chatting, taking notes, and sharing URLs and bits of code.
add
, commit
, ...status
, diff
, ...clone
, pull
, push
, ...where
join
To participate in a Software Carpentry workshop, you will need access to the software described below. In addition, you will need an up-to-date web browser.
We maintain a list of common issues that occur during installation as a reference for instructors that may be useful on the Configuration Problems and Solutions wiki page.
Bash is a commonly-used shell that gives you the power to do simple tasks more quickly.
Download the Git for Windows installer. Run the installer. Important: on the 6th page of the installation wizard (the page titled `Configuring the terminal emulator...`) select `Use Windows' default console window`. If you forgot to do this programs that you need for the workshop will not work properly. If this happens rerun the installer and select the appropriate option. This will provide you with both Git and Bash in the Git Bash program.
The default shell in all versions of Mac OS X is bash, so no
need to install anything. You access bash from the Terminal
(found in
/Applications/Utilities
). You may want to keep
Terminal in your dock for this workshop.
The default shell is usually Bash, but if your
machine is set up differently you can run it by opening a
terminal and typing bash
. There is no need to
install anything.
Git is a version control system that lets you track who made changes to what when and has options for easily updating a shared or public version of your code on github.com. You will need a supported web browser (current versions of Chrome, Firefox or Safari, or Internet Explorer version 9 or above).
Git should be installed on your computer as part of your Bash install (described above).
For OS X 10.9 and higher, install Git for Mac
by downloading and running the most recent "mavericks" installer from
this list.
After installing Git, there will not be anything in your /Applications
folder,
as Git is a command line program.
For older versions of OS X (10.5-10.8) use the
most recent available installer labelled "snow-leopard"
available here.
If Git is not already available on your machine you can try to
install it via your distro's package manager. For Debian/Ubuntu run
sudo apt-get install git
and for Fedora run
sudo yum install git
.
When you're writing code, it's nice to have a text editor that is
optimized for writing code, with features like automatic
color-coding of key words. The default text editor on Mac OS X and
Linux is usually set to Vim, which is not famous for being
intuitive. if you accidentally find yourself stuck in it, try
typing the escape key, followed by :q!
(colon, lower-case 'q',
exclamation mark), then hitting Return to return to the shell.
nano is a basic editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop. To install it, download the Software Carpentry Windows installer and double click on the file to run it. This installer requires an active internet connection.
Others editors that you can use are Notepad++ or Sublime Text. Be aware that you must add its installation directory to your system path. Please ask your instructor to help you do this.
nano is a basic editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop. It should be pre-installed.
Others editors that you can use are Text Wrangler or Sublime Text.
nano is a basic editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop. It should be pre-installed.
Others editors that you can use are Gedit, Kate or Sublime Text.
Python is a popular language for scientific computing, and great for general-purpose programming as well. Installing all of its scientific packages individually can be a bit difficult, so we recommend an all-in-one installer.
Regardless of how you choose to install it, please make sure you install Python version 2.x and not version 3.x (e.g., 2.7 is fine but not 3.4). Python 3 introduced changes that will break some of the code we teach during the workshop.
We will teach Python using the IPython notebook, a programming environment that runs in a web browser. For this to work you will need a reasonably up-to-date browser. The current versions of the Chrome, Safari and Firefox browsers are all supported (some older browsers, including Internet Explorer version 9 and below, are not).
We recommend the all-in-one scientific Python installer Anaconda. (Installation requires using the shell and if you aren't comfortable doing the installation yourself just download the installer and we'll help you at the workshop.)
bash Anaconda-and then press tab. The name of the file you just downloaded should appear.
yes
and
press enter to approve the license. Press enter to approve the
default location for the files. Type yes
and
press enter to prepend Anaconda to your PATH
(this makes the Anaconda distribution the default Python).
Once you are done installing the software listed above, please go to this page, which has instructions on how to test that everything was installed correctly.
SQL is a specialized programming language used with databases. We use a simple database manager called SQLite in our lessons.
The Software Carpentry Windows Installer installs SQLite for Windows. If you used the installer to configure nano, you don't need to run it again.
SQLite comes pre-installed on Mac OS X.
SQLite comes pre-installed on Linux.
If you installed Anaconda, it also has a copy of SQLite
without support to readline
.
Instructors will provide a workaround for it if needed.