Mar 13-14, 2020
Friday from 9:00 am - 3:00 pm and Saturday from 10:00 am - 3:00 pm with 1 hour lunch break each day
Instructors: Shervin Sahba, Saber Soleymani
Helpers: Karen Robinett, Andy Loerch, TBD
Software Carpentry aims to help researchers get their work done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic research computing skills. This hands-on workshop will cover basic concepts and tools, including program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.
For more information on what we teach and why, please see our paper "Best Practices for Scientific Computing".
Who: This workshop is only open to SDSU students, staff, and faculty. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.
Where: Storm Hall, SAL and FINCH Computer Labs, 5500 Campanile Dr, San Diego, CA 92182. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.
When: Mar 13-14, 2020. Add to your Google Calendar.
Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that they have administrative privileges on. They should R and RStudio installed and ready to go. Additionally, installing the ggplot2 package ahead of time is useful. You can install ggplot2 by running the R command: install.packages("ggplot2"). Instructions on installing R and RStudio are listed below. Please bring your own snacks and lunch.
Accessibility: We are committed to making this workshop accessible to everybody. The workshop organizers have checked that:
Materials will be provided in advance of the workshop and large-print handouts are available if needed by notifying the organizers in advance. If we can help making learning easier for you (e.g. sign-language interpreters, lactation facilities) please get in touch (using contact details below) and we will attempt to provide them.
Contact: Please email krobinett8114@sdsu.edu , ssahba@uw.edu or postorder@gmail.com for more information.
Registration: Eventbrite tickets
Everyone who participates in Carpentries activities is required to conform to the Code of Conduct.This document also outlines how to report an incident if needed.
We will use this collaborative document for chatting, taking notes, and sharing URLs and bits of code.
Please be sure to complete these surveys before and after the workshop.
Our tentative schedule is below. Pease bring your own lunch and snacks for our breaks.
| Before | Pre-workshop survey |
| 09:00 | Introduction to R and RStudio |
| 09:45 | Project Management With RStudio |
| 10:00 | Seeking Help |
| 10:30 | Break |
| 11:00 | Data Structures |
| 11:30 | Exploring Data Frames |
| 12:00 | Lunch break |
| 13:00 | Subsetting Data |
| 13:15 | Control Flow |
| 14:00 | Creating Publication-Quality Graphics with ggplot2 |
| 15:00 | END |
| 10:00 | Vectorization |
| 10:30 | Functions Explained |
| 11:00 | Writing Data |
| 12:00 | Splitting and Combining Data Frames with plyr |
| 12:30 | Lunch break |
| 13:30 | Dataframe Manipulation with dplyr |
| 14:00 | Dataframe Manipulation with tidyr |
| 15:00 | Producing Reports With knitr |
| 15:30 | Post-workshop Survey |
| 16:00 | END |
To participate in a Software Carpentry workshop, you will need access to the software described below. In addition, you will need an up-to-date web browser.
We maintain a list of common issues that occur during installation as a reference for instructors that may be useful on the Configuration Problems and Solutions wiki page.
R is a programming language that is especially powerful for data exploration, visualization, and statistical analysis. To interact with R, we use RStudio.
Install R by downloading and running this .exe file from CRAN. Also, please install the RStudio IDE. Note that if you have separate user and admin accounts, you should run the installers as administrator (right-click on .exe file and select "Run as administrator" instead of double-clicking). Otherwise problems may occur later, for example when installing R packages.
Install R by downloading and running this .pkg file from CRAN. Also, please install the RStudio IDE.
You can download the binary files for your distribution
from CRAN. Or
you can use your package manager (e.g. for Debian/Ubuntu
run sudo apt-get install r-base and for Fedora run
sudo dnf install R). Also, please install the
RStudio IDE.