Course team: Anton Akhmerov, Michael Wimmer, and others
Course days: five days, fulltime
Credits: 5 GSC
Course description: The majority of scientists encounter tasks where programming is either helpful or even required. With relatively little training, you can solve these tasks in a fast, systematic, and clean way while also making your solutions reusable for yourself and others. This one-week long intensive workshop will give you this training.
You will learn:
- Basics of programming: the ABCs.
- The unix shell: a different view on your files.
- Using libraries: stand on the shoulders of giants.
- Structuring your program: no spaghetti code.
- Testing: are you really sure there are no bugs?
- Version control: this worked yesterday!
- Communicating with hardware.
- Data storage and processing: how to not get lost.
- Next steps: publishing your code, using supercomputers, and more.
We will focus on hands-on exercises where you will immediately apply the new skills.
It is impossible to master these topics within a week, but you will know how to improve and where to look for further development. The course is suitable for people with little prior knowledge as well as for those familiar with some of the course topics.
The course is based on the Python programming language due to its low entry barrier and popularity within scientific computing, however many things that you learn will apply to other programming languages.
The course is aimed at both PhD students and postdocs.