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St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix

Jan 10-11, 2015

9:00 am - 4:30 pm

Instructors: Naupaka Zimmerman, Jonathan Strootman

Helpers: To be determined

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 workshop 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.

Who: The course is aimed at medical students, physicians, and other researchers.

Where: Sonntag Pavilion, St. Joseph's Hospital. 350 West Thomas Rd, Phoenix, AZ 85013. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.

Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a few specific software packages installed (listed below). They are also required to abide by Software Carpentry's Code of Conduct.

Contact: Please mail sammankin@gmail.com for more information.


Follow Up

For all those who attended this workshop, thank you for coming and we hope you found it helpful!

We will be keeping this site up indefinitely, and we've updated this page to provide links to the material we used for the workshop.

The schedule below has been updated with links to the Software Carpentry lessons used for each corresponding module.
Software Carpentry is constantly trying to improve their lessons, as well as creating new material. Please take a look at the Software Carpenty Lessons. There you will find up-to-date versions of all of the Software Carpentry lessons, including the material we covered!

Once again, thanks for coming. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the instructors Naupaka Zimmerman and Jonathan Strootman.

Schedule

Day 1

09:00 Intro to scripting and analysis in R
10:30 Coffee break
12:00 Lunch break
13:00 Getting around and automating tasks in the shell
14:30 Coffee break
16:00 Wrap-up

Day 2

09:00 Version control with Git
10:30 Coffee break
12:00 Lunch break
13:00 Data munging and visualization with ggplot and R. Final exercise with ggplot and knitr available here.
14:30 Coffee break
16:00 Wrap-up

Setup

To participate in a Software Carpentry workshop, 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 workshop.

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.

R

R is a programming language that is especially powerful for data exploration, visualization, and statistical analysis. To interact with R, we will use RStudio, an interactive development environment (IDE).

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.

Software Carpentry Installer

This installer requires an active internet connection

After installing Python and Git Bash:

  • Download the installer.
  • If the file opens directly in the browser select File→Save Page As to download it to your computer.
  • Double click on the file to run it.

Editor

nano is the editor installed by the Software Carpentry Installer, it is a basic editor integrated into the lesson material.

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.

R

Install R by downloading and running this .exe file from CRAN. Also, please install the RStudio IDE.

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

For OS X 10.8 and higher, 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 for your OS available here. Use the Leopard installer for 10.5 and the Snow Leopard installer for 10.6-10.7.

R

Install R by downloading and running this .pkg file from CRAN. Also, please install the RStudio IDE.

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.

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 or yum).

Editor

Kate is one option for Linux users. In a pinch, you can use nano, which should be pre-installed.

R

You can download the binary files for your distribution from CRAN. Or you can use your package manager, e.g. for Debian/Ubuntu run apt-get install r-base or yum install R. Also, please install the RStudio IDE.

All operating systems