January 10-11, 2019
8:30 AM - 4.30 PM
Instructors: Timothy Moore, James Mickley, Cera Fisher, Artemis Louyakis, Jeremy Teitelbaum
Helpers: Eliza Grames, Dipanjana Dalui, Alex Trouern-Trend, Pariksheet Nanda
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, advanced undergraduates, professors, and other researchers. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.
Where: Room #127, School of Business(BUSN), 2100 Hillside Rd, Storrs, CT 06269. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps. Parking for non UConn folks is best at South Garage
When: January 10-11, 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 to install software 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 timothy.e.moore@uconn.edu , james.mickley@uconn.edu , cera.fisher@uconn.edu , Artemis.Louyakis@uconn.edu or jeremy.teitelbaum@uconn.edu for more information.
Please be sure to complete these surveys before and after the workshop.
| Before | Pre-workshop survey |
| 08:30 | Intro to Programming with R - Timothy Moore |
| 10:30 | Coffee |
| 12:00 | Lunch break |
| 13:00 | Version control with Git - Jeremy Teitelbaum |
| 14:30 | Coffee |
| 16:00 | Wrap-up |
| 16:30 | END |
| 09:00 | Plotting in R - Dyanna Louyakis |
| 10:30 | Coffee |
| 10:45 | Programming with R cont. - James Mickley |
| 12:00 | Lunch break |
| 13:00 | Manipulating Data & Producing Reports in R - Cera Fisher |
| 14:30 | Coffee |
| 16:00 | Wrap-up |
| 16:30 | Post-workshop Survey |
| 16:40 | END |
We will use this collaborative document for chatting, taking notes, and sharing URLs and bits of code.
ggplot2dplyr and tidyrknitradd, commit, ...status, diff, ...clone, pull, push, ...First and foremost, we recommend the lessons from Software Carpentry that we followed for this course. We've added links to those lessons in the syllabus above.
Downloadable etherpad notes: HTML, PDF, Word Doc.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.
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.
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.
Github for Education offers a free 2-year plan for students and educators that allows you to have private repositories. You can apply for an education plan here
Alternatively, you can use UConn's GitHub at github.uconn.edu. Just login with your netID, and you will have unlimited free public and private repositories. However, you cannot collaborate on those repositories with those outside UConn.
cmd and press [Enter])setx HOME "%USERPROFILE%"
SUCCESS: Specified value was saved.exit then pressing [Enter]This will provide you with both Git and Bash in the Git Bash program.
For OS X 10.9 and higher, install Git for Mac
by downloading and running the most recent "mavericks" installer from
this list.
Because this installer is not signed by the developer, you may have to
right click (control click) on the .pkg file, click Open, and click
Open on the pop up window.
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, hit the Esc 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. It is installed along with Git.
Others editors that you can use are Notepad++ or Sublime Text. Be aware that you must add its installation directory to your system path. Please ask your instructor to help you do this.
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 BBEdit 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.