Audience

Many scientists need to program on a routine basis in order to analyse their data. While being a necesary requirement, usually scientists are never taught how to program properly. This course tries to help out. Note that there is as big difference between serious programming (what this course is about) and writing scripts for small tasks.

Who should take it?

Scientists finding themselves programming every once a while or even regularly and striving to improve their programming skills, with a particular focus on reproducible research and long-lasting code that can be shared with others.

This implies that you’re interested in programming, not writing small scripts for single tasks. Single scripts usually do not allow for sensible reproducibility, although some people claim that one script per dataset analysis is their approach to it. Programming actually deals with writing larger pieces of code that can be sensibly used by others, even non-programmers.

Who should not take it?

People who are impatient, assume that they already know everything they need to know, or are not interested in thinking through some more general ideas and concepts.