March 12-13, 2018
9:00 am - 4:30 pm
Instructors: Danielle Quinn, Oliver Stueker, Ivo Arrey
Helpers: Oihane Cereceda, Emilie Geissinger, Ernest Awonoor-Williams
Until March 1st, registration is limited to those attending the Science Atlantic Biology and Fisheries & Aquaculture Conference. After March 1st, registration will be open to anyone!
Upon registering, please be sure to complete the pre-workshop survey. These surveys help us choose and pace the lessons that we will present at the workshop. Software Carpentry is consistently evaluating workshops to understand the impact workshops have on learners, and how the content delivery can be improved.
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: using the Shell for task automation, Git/GitHub for version control, and basic to intermediate R programming skills, including manipulating data with {dplyr}, generating figures with {ggplot2}, and creating dynamic R markdown documents with {knitr}. 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 students and researchers from any field of study. No previous knowledge of or experience with the tools presented at the workshop is required.
Where: Room IIC-2014, Bruneau Center for Research and Innovation, Memorial University, 230 Elizabeth Avenue, St. John's, Newfoundland. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.
When: March 12-13, 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), which will require at least R version 3.1.2. 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 organisers 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 danielle.quinn@mun.ca for more information.
If you have any problems installing the required software (see Setup, below), please arrive 30 minutes early so that we can help you solve them!
| 09:00 | Automating Tasks with the Shell |
| 10:30 | Coffee |
| 12:00 | Lunch break |
| 13:00 | R Part I: Introduction to R |
| 14:30 | Coffee |
| 16:00 | Wrap-up |
| 09:00 | Version Control with Git |
| 10:30 | Coffee |
| 12:00 | Lunch break |
| 13:00 | R Part II: Doing More with R |
| 14:30 | Coffee |
| 16:00 | Wrap-up |
We will use this collaborative document for chatting, taking notes, and sharing URLs and bits of code.
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.
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.
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).
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 yum 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 Mac OS X 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. It is automatically installed with Git-for-Windows v2.15.1 or newer.
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 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 yum install R). Also, please install the
RStudio IDE.