Intro to Programming: COMP90014 Week 2

In this workshop we'll cover a very little bit of the Unix shell, and then do an introductory programming workshop in Python. This workshop borrows very heavily from Software Carpentry, but we won't have time to cover all the things that Software Carpentry workshops cover. If you want to learn programming then working through other Software Carpentry lessons is an excellent way to do so.

Contents

The Unix Shell

1. Setup
2. Files and directories
3. Creating things
4. Running our first Python program

Programming with Python

1. Setup
2. Learning Python for Bioinformatics: Hamming Distance
3. Extra stuff: Libraries

Detailed setup instructions

You can get more information on setting up various bits and pieces you might need at this Software Carpentry setup guide. For this particular workshop, you should not need to set up most of these - this is just for reference.

More learning resources

In this workshop, we will only have time to cover a few things. If you want to learn more, or if you are confused and want a more thorough introduction, here are some good resources:

• The original, full-length, Software Carpentry lessons, particularly those on The Unix Shell and Programming with Python.
• Dr Bernard Pope's Introduction to Unix (Bernie lectured on Algorithms in Week 1).
• Dr Bernard Pope's COMP10001 lectures on Python. These give a much more detailed introduction to Python. NB: These are currently out of date - we'll try to re-link to this content.
  • Introduction to Python, variables and types
  • Strings
  • More about strings
  • Lists
  You can also keep an eye on the lesson plan for future lessons.