This course aims to introduce students to aspects of computer usage that they often have not seen before, but that are common in scientific research. This includes programming in several kinds of languages, with some focus on practices that are useful in pursuing research projects.
4 units, 3 hours/week (primarily lab)
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The Unix shell and how to use this and many of the Unix tools for programming in it. |
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Programing in awk, as an introduction to a simple programming language. |
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Introduction to MATLAB for numerical computation. |
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Fortran programming. |
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Use of plotxy and GMT to make high-quality plots of data and research results. |
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Use of LaTeX for preparing publications. |
For some of these topics there is a considerable amount of material available on the Web; for others we will be providing notes. This subject is best learnt by actual practice, so there will be plenty of course exercises.
While there are new class notes and problem sets, the notes do not try to be complete, given what is available elsewhere.
Older versions of the course material are available here (from Graham Kent) and here (from Peter Shearer).