March 29-30, 2018
8:30am - 4:30pm
Instructors: Chris DeBoever, Upendra Kumar Devisetty , Lorraine (Lori) Ling
Helpers: Keith Bettinger, Peter Alexander Mangiafico, Magdalena Matusiak, Leanna Owen, Zac Painter, Ali Shariati, Elizaveta (Liza) Tremsina, Simone Anita Thair
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 Postdoctoral scholars and other researchers. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.
Where: Li Ka Shing Center LKSC room 102, 291 Campus Drive, Stanford, CA 94305. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.
When: March 29-30, 2018. 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 we will do our best to accommodate special need requests in order to facilitate learning. Please notify the organizers (contact details below) in advance so that they can discuss with you what can be provided.
Contact: Please email rmoran@stanford.edu for more information.
Surveys
Please be sure to complete these surveys before and after the workshop.
Please download and save the gaminder dataset before the workshop.
Go to this link, Save Page as "gapminder-FiveYearData.csv"
| 08:30 | Breakfast |
| 09:00 | Automating tasks with the Unix shell |
| - | Introducing the Shell |
| - | Files and Directories |
| - | Creating Things |
| - | Pipes and Filters |
| TBD | Break |
| - | Finding things |
| - | Loops |
| - | Shell Scripts |
| 12:00 | Lunch |
| 13:00 | Version control with Git |
| - | Introduction to Git and GitHub |
| - | Setting Up Git |
| - | Creating a repository |
| - | Tracking Changes |
| 15:00 | Coffee Tea Break |
| - | Ignoring Things |
| - | Exploring History |
| - | Capstone Project |
| 16:00 | Wrap-up |
| 16:30 | END |
| 08:30 | Breakfast |
| 09:00 | Brief review of Day 1 |
| 09:15 | R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis (Part 1) |
| - | Introduction to RStudio interface |
| - | Data Types |
| - | Data Structures |
| TBD | Break |
| - | Reading in data |
| - | Subsetting data in base R |
| - | Subsetting data with dplyr |
| 12:00 | Lunch |
| 13:00 | R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis (Part 2) |
| - | Loops |
| - | Conditionals |
| - | Functions |
| 15:00 | Coffee Break |
| - | Plotting in base R |
| - | Impressive plots with ggplot2 |
| - | Project management |
| - | Git in Rstudio |
| 16:00 | Wrap-up |
| 16:30 | END |
We will use this collaborative document for chatting, taking notes, and sharing URLs and bits of code.
add, commit, ...status, diff, ...clone, pull, push, ...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.
This will provide you with both Git and Bash in the Git Bash program.
cmd and press [Enter])setx HOME "%USERPROFILE%"
SUCCESS: Specified value was saved.exit then pressing [Enter]
The default shell in all versions of macOS is Bash, so no
need to install anything. You access Bash from the Terminal
(found in
/Applications/Utilities).
See the Git installation video tutorial
for an example on how to open the Terminal.
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).
You will need an account at github.com for parts of the Git lesson. Basic GitHub accounts are free. We encourage you to create a GitHub account if you don't have one already. Please consider what personal information you'd like to reveal. For example, you may want to review these instructions for keeping your email address private provided at GitHub.
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 dnf 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 macOS 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.
If you prefer to use other editors (such as Notepad++ or Sublime Text. Be aware that you must add their installation directories to your system path to ensure that they run correctly in Git Bash. If you are not sure how to do this, please install and use 'nano' for the duration of the workshop.
nano is a basic editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop. See the Git installation video tutorial for an example on how to open nano. 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.
R is a programming language that is especially powerful for data exploration, visualization, and statistical analysis. To interact with R, we use RStudio.
Install R by downloading and running this .exe file from CRAN. Also, please install the RStudio IDE. Note that if you have separate user and admin accounts, you should run the installers as administrator (right-click on .exe file and select "Run as administrator" instead of double-clicking). Otherwise problems may occur later, for example when installing R packages.
Install R by downloading and running this .pkg file from CRAN. Also, please install the RStudio IDE.
You can download the binary files for your distribution
from CRAN. Or
you can use your package manager (e.g. for Debian/Ubuntu
run sudo apt-get install r-base and for Fedora run
sudo dnf install R). Also, please install the
RStudio IDE.