Software Carpentry is Great!

Version 1122 (Sun May 7 15:02:14 2006)

The Problem Many scientists and engineers spend much of their lives writing, debugging, and maintaining software, but only a handful have ever been taught how to do this effectively: after a couple of introductory courses, they are left to rediscover (or reinvent) the rest of programming on their own. The result? Most spend far too much time wrestling with software, instead of doing research, but have no idea how reliable or efficient their programs are. The Solution This site presents an intensive course on basic software development practices for scientists and engineers. Its aim is not to turn biochemists and mechanical engineers into computer scientists; instead, it introduces them to the 10% of modern software engineering that will satisfy 90% of their needs. The course has been taught at laboratories and universities in Canada and the United States since 1998. It is now being upgraded, and will be made freely available under an open license in the fall of 2005. Status This Nature article describes the course's background and goals in more detail. See this page for known issues with the course.

Lectures Introduction Shell Basics More Shell Version Control Automated Builds Basic Scripting Strings, Lists, and Files Functions and Libraries Style Quality Assurance Sets, Dictionaries, and Complexity Debugging Object-Oriented Programming More on Objects Unit Testing Regular Expressions Binary Data XML Relational Databases Spreadsheets Integration Web Client Programming Web Server Programming Security The Development Process Teamware Backward, Forward, and Sideways Acknowledgments License Bibliography Glossary Online Resources List of Figures List of Tables Syllabus