So you’ve arrived at P4P with your laptop charged and your headphones poised for action … But now, how do you fill the time until the pizza arrives?
Decide between learning Python or R first. Maybe your lab has a preference… or these links could help you choose which one to work on first, read here or here.
Begin with a short(!) online course, especially if you are an absolute beginner to programming. This gives you some fundamentals quickly, along with an important feeling of accomplishment, that you’ve finished something within 2 weeks of starting at P4P.
Crucial to remaining motivated and continuing P4P is setting small learning or project goals for your programming. Otherwise, it’s just pizza with friends.
Next, Download Python here. Or R here. (The Anaconda Distribution of Python here is heavy, but has lots of neat stuff in its package, as you’ll discover later…)
Here are some courseWARE suggestions for you…
- Datacamp
- OpenIntro (R)
- Software Carpentry Courseware
- EdX
- CodeAcademy
- MIT
- learnpython.org
- The Open Book Project
- Coursera
- Coursera Guided Projects
See this PCworld 2018 review about online Python courses, if you can’t decide.
Next you could figure out what a Jupyter notebook is … or watch this Github rainbow poetry tutorial series to learn about Git and version-control for your code
Got the basics and coming back next week?
Sign up for our #Discord so you can see what projects other people have been working on and hear the latest P4P news.
Finally, request access to our Pizza4Python Github to make push & pull requests. Ask the P4P host for more info about this.
Background reading about best programming practices:
Read these reviews about “Best” and “Good enough” practices for your coding and managing data as a life scientist.
Do you have some better ideas or recommendations for this list? Tell us all about it on our dedicated #Discord channel!
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