Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society
Delta Bessborough Hotel, 601 Spadina Crescent East, Saskatoon, SKJun 22-24, 2014
9:00 am - 4:30 pm
General Information
Software Carpentry's mission is to help scientists and engineers become more productive by teaching them basic lab skills for computing like program design, version control, data management, and task automation. This two-day hands-on bootcamp will cover basic concepts and tools; participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.
Instructors: Dhavide Aruliah, Ian Mitchell
Who: The course is aimed at graduate students and other researchers.
Where: Delta Bessborough Hotel, 601 Spadina Crescent East, Saskatoon, SK. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps. Sessions will be held in the William Pascoe room.
Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a few specific software packages installed (listed below).
Contact: Please mail admin@software-carpentry.org for more information.
Schedule
| Sunday | 09:00-12:00 | Introduction the Unix shell and task automation (data) |
| 12:00-14:00 | Lunch break | |
| 14:00-17:00 | MATLAB programming for data analysis (data, scripts) | |
| Monday | 15:00-18:00 | Version control with Git |
| Tuesday | 16:00-19:00 | Modular programming in MATLAB |
Setup
To participate in a Software Carpentry bootcamp, you will need working copies of the software described below. Please make sure to install everything (or at least to download the installers) before the start of your bootcamp.
Overview
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. 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.
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.
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.
MATLAB
MATLAB is a very popular commercial environment for scientific computing. For this bootcamp, we will assume that you have installed MATLAB already on your system in the operating system of your choice. We will assume that you have some experience in working with MATLAB (e.g., basic loop constructs, branching, functions, etc.) from which to build higher-level programming skills.
Windows
Git Bash
Install Git for Windows by download and running the installer. This will provide you with both Git and Bash in the Git Bash program.
Editor
Notepad++ is a popular free code editor for Windows. Be aware that you must add its installation directory to your system path in order to launch it from the command line (or have other tools like Git launch it for you). Please ask your instructor to help you do this.
MATLAB
As MATLAB is commercial software, you will have to arrange to have a licensed copy of MATLAB for your Windows system.
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.
Editor
We recommend
Text Wrangler or
Sublime Text.
In a pinch, you can use nano,
which should be pre-installed.
Git
Install Git for Mac by downloading and running the installer. For older versions of OS X (10.5-10.7) use the most recent available installer available here. Use the Leopard installer for 10.5 and the Snow Leopard installer for 10.6-10.7.
MATLAB
As MATLAB is commercial software, you will have to arrange to have a licensed copy of MATLAB for your Mac system.
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.
Editor
Kate is one option for Linux users.
In a pinch, you can use nano,
which should be pre-installed.
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).
MATLAB
As MATLAB is commercial software, you will have to arrange to have a licensed copy of MATLAB for your Linux system.