January 22-23, 29-30
9:00 am - 12:00 pm
Instructors: Tom Morrell, Stephen Davison, Nicholas Cifuentes-Goodbody
Helpers: Peter Collopy, Donna Wrublewski
Software Carpentry aims to help researchers get their work done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic research computing skills. 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 for Caltech Postdocs. The library will offer additional general Software and Data Carpentry courses soon. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.
Where: Millikan 9th Floor. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.
When: January 22-23, 29-30. Add to your Google Calendar.
Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that they have administrative privileges on. They should have a few specific software packages installed (listed below). They are also required to abide by Software Carpentry's Code of Conduct.
Accessibility: We are committed to making this workshop accessible to everybody. The workshop organizers have checked that:
Materials will be provided in advance of the workshop and large-print handouts are available if needed by notifying the organizers in advance. If we can help making learning easier for you (e.g. sign-language interpreters, lactation facilities) please get in touch (using contact details below) and we will attempt to provide them.
Contact: Please email library@caltech.edu for more information.
| 09:00 | Jupyter Notebooks, Basic Data Plotting, Loops |
| 10:30 | Break |
| 10:45 | Lists and Files |
| 12:00 | END |
| 09:00 | Conditionals and Functions |
| 10:30 | Break |
| 10:45 | Errors and Defensive Programming |
| 12:00 | END |
| 09:00 | Working with the command line and using Pandas |
| 10:30 | Break |
| 10:45 | Managing DataFrames to work with tabular data |
| 12:00 | END |
| 09:00 | Data types and combining data |
| 10:30 | Break |
| 10:45 | Advanced plotting (ggplot) and Open Science |
| 12:00 | END |
We used Jupyter notebooks during the workshop to collect our code. Here are the instructor notebooks from the end of each day:
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.
Download the data files and extract and save them somewhere where you can find them easily (like your Desktop).
Python is a popular language for research computing, and great for general-purpose programming as well. Installing all of its research packages individually can be a bit difficult, so we recommend Anaconda, an all-in-one installer.
Regardless of how you choose to install it, please make sure you install Python version 3.x (e.g., 3.6 is fine).
We will teach Python using the Jupyter 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).
bash Anaconda3-and then press tab. The name of the file you just downloaded should appear. If it does not, navigate to the folder where you downloaded the file, for example with:
cd DownloadsThen, try again.
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).