Greenwich, England
Oct 24-25, 2013
9:00 am - 4:30 pm
Instructors: Greg Wilson, James Hetherington, Karthik Ram
What: Our goal is to help scientists and engineers become more productive by teaching them basic computing skills like program design, version control, testing, and task automation. In this two-day boot camp, short tutorials will alternate with hands-on practical exercises. Participants will be encouraged both to help one another, and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems during and between sessions. Attendants are offered online office hours: regular events to get one-on-one help from Software Carpentry instructors, online.
Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a few specific software packages installed. (The list will be sent to participants a week before the boot camp.)
Schedule: our plans for Thursday and Friday are outlined below, but we will shorten or lengthen sessions depending on how things are going and what people are most interested in. Later lessons do depend on earlier material, so we advise people to attend the full two days.
- Thursday morning: introductions; setup; the Unix shell
- Thursday afternoon: programming with Python
- Friday morning: version control with Git
- Friday afternoon: managing databases with SQL
Please download survey.db and save it for use in the database tutorial. This is not a text file, so please don't try to open it in an editor.
Please download these four files and save them in your 'pongo' directory:
Contact: Please mail admin-uk@software-carpentry.org for more information.
Software
In order to take part in the bootcamp, please set up this software before you arrive.
Editor
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.
Windows / Editor
Notepad++ is a popular free code editor for Windows.
Mac OS X / Editor
We recommend Text Wrangler or Sublime Text.
The Bash Shell
Bash is a commonly-used shell. Using a shell gives you more power to do more tasks more quickly with your computer.
Windows / Git Bash
Install Git Bash following these instructions. This gives you Git as well as Bash.
Mac OS X / Bash
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.
Linux / Bash
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.
Python
Python is becoming more and more popular in scientific computing, and it's a great language for teaching general programming concepts due to its easy-to-read syntax. We will be using Python version 2.7. Installing all the scientific packages for Python individually can be a bit difficult, so we recommend using an all-in-one installer.
Linux / Python
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 boot camp.)
- Download the installer that matches your operating system and save it in your home folder.
- Open a terminal window..
-
Type
bash Anaconda-
and then press tab. The name of the file you just downloaded should appear. -
Press enter. You will follow the text-only
prompts. When there is a colon at the bottom of the
screen press the down arrow to move down through the
text. Type
yesand press enter to approve the license. Press enter to approve the default location for the files. Typeyesand press enter to prepend Anaconda to yourPATH(this makes the Anaconda distribution the default Python).
Mac OS X / Python
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 boot camp.)
- Download the installer that matches your operating system and save it in your home folder.
- Open a terminal window.
-
Type
bash Anaconda-
and then press tab. The name of the file you just downloaded should appear. -
Press enter. You will follow the text-only
prompts. When there is a colon at the bottom of the
screen press the down arrow to move down through the
text. Type
yesand press enter to approve the license. Press enter to approve the default location for the files. Typeyesand press enter to prepend Anaconda to yourPATH(this makes the Anaconda distribution the default Python).
Windows / Python
For Windows we recommend the Enthought Canopy distribution since it seems to work well with Git Bash.
For other options check the Python4Astronomers page on installing scientific Python.
Git
Git is a state-of-the-art version control system. It 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.
Linux / Git
If Git is not already available on your machine you can try
to install it via your distro's package manager
(e.g. apt-get).
Mac OS X / Git
Installing Git may require you to first install XCode. This is a very large download (several gigabytes), so please do it before arriving at the bootcamp.
For Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8:
Go to the Xcode website. Get XCode from the App Store making certain to install the command line tools (from the Download preferences pane). Git is included in the command line tools.
Please note that xcode is a very large download (~ 3gb) so please make every effort to download and install from a high speed connection BEFORE the bootcamp.
For Mac OS X 10.6
If you have Mac OS X 10.6,
first get XCode by going to
the Apple developer site.
You have to sign in with an Apple ID linked to a Developer account.
If you don't have one,
you can register and create one.
Once you log in,
go to page 8 and find "XCode 3.2.6 and iOS SDK 4.3 for Snow Leopard".
Click to open that section,
and then download the .dmg file.
Finally,
install just git.