April 25, 2023
9:00 am - 4:00 pm EST
Instructors: Elif Dede Yildirim, Chasz Griego
Helpers: helper one, helper two
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 is aimed at graduate students and other researchers. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.
Where: Room E, 730 East Glebe Road, Alexandria, VA, 22305. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.
When: April 25, 2023. 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).
Accessibility: We are committed to making this workshop accessible to everybody. For workshops at a physical location, the workshop organizers have checked that:
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 kpaganri@ida.org or dataworks@testscience.org for more information.
Everyone who participates in Carpentries activities is required to conform to the Code of Conduct. This document also outlines how to report an incident if needed.
Please be sure to complete these surveys before and after the workshop.
| Before | Pre-workshop survey |
| 09:00 | Introduction |
| 09:05 | Running and Quitting |
| 09:20 | Variables and Assignment |
| 09:40 | Data Types and Type Conversion |
| 10:00 | Built-in Functions and Help |
| 10:20 | Morning break |
| 10:30 | Libraries |
| 10:50 | Reading Tabular Data into DataFrames |
| 11:10 | Pandas DataFrames |
| 11:40 | Plotting |
| 12:00 | Lunch break |
| 13:00 | Lists |
| 13:20 | For Loops |
| 13:45 | Conditionals |
| 14:10 | Looping Over Data Sets |
| 14:25 | Afternoon break |
| 14:35 | Writing Functions |
| 14:55 | Variable Scope |
| 15:15 | Programming Style |
| 15:45 | Wrap-up |
| 16:00 | END |
To participate in a Software Carpentry workshop, you will need access to software as described below. For this workshop, please make sure to download the gapminder dataset. 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.
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 (Jupyter Notebook will be installed by Anaconda). 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 to autocomplete the full file name. The name of file you just downloaded should appear.
yes and press enter to approve the license.
Press Enter (or Return)
to approve the default location
for the files.
Type yes and press
Enter (or Return)
to prepend Anaconda to your PATH
(this makes the Anaconda distribution the default Python).