UCSB Library

Oct 10, 11, 17, 18, 2019

1:00 pm - 4:30 pm

Instructors: Greg Janée, Yuan Wu, Ian Lessing, Sanjeev Kolli

Helpers: Kristi Liu, Jon Jablonski, Sharon Solis

General Information

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: UCSB Library Classroom 1312 or 1575. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.

When: Oct 10, 11, 17, 18, 2019. 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).

Code of Conduct: 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.

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-collaboratory@ucsb.edu for more information.

Survey

Please be sure to complete surveys before and after the workshop.

Pre-workshop Survey

Ether Pad We will use this collaborative document for chatting, taking notes, and sharing URLs and bits of code.

Schedule

Day 1 - Thursday Oct 10, 2019

Before Pre-workshop survey
1:00 General Introduction & Setup
1:15 1. Running and Quitting
2:00 2. Variables and Assignments
3:00 3. Data Types and Type Conversion
4:00 4. Built in Functions and Help

Day 2 - Friday Oct 11, 2019

1:00 6. Libraries
1:30 7. Reading Tabular Data into Dataframes
2:00 8. Pandas Dataframes
3:00 9. Plotting

Day 3 - Thursday Oct 17, 2019

1:00 Lists
1:30 For Loops
2:00 Looping Over Data Sets
3:00 Writing Functions
1:00 Variable Scope

Day 4 - Friday Oct 18th, 2019

1:30 Conditionals
2:00 Programming Style
Web Scraping
Intro to High Performance Computing
Wrap-Up
4:00 Post-workshop Survey
4:40 END

Please be sure to complete surveys before and after the workshop.

Post-workshop Survey

Python Syllabus

Plotting and Programming in Python

  • Interactive Jupyter Notebooks
  • Variables
  • Type and Type Conversion
  • Built in Functions
  • Libraries
  • Reading Tabular Data with Pandas Library
  • Data Frames - with Pandas
  • Lists
  • For Loops
  • Looping over data sets
  • Writing Functions
  • Variable Scope
  • Conditionals
  • Programming Style
  • Reference...

Setup

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.

Python

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).

  1. Open https://www.anaconda.com/download/#linux with your web browser.
  2. Download the Python 3 installer for Linux.
    (The installation requires using the shell. If you aren't comfortable doing the installation yourself stop here and request help at the workshop.)
  3. Open a terminal window.
  4. Type 
    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 Downloads
    Then, try again.
  5. Press Return. You will follow the text-only prompts. To move through the text, press Spacebar. Type 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).
  6. Close the terminal window.