My notebooks for Columbia University bootcamp 2019-08-26 & 27

Alan Crosswell

What's here?

Notebooks named [0-9][0-9]-*.ipynb

These are my notebooks created in preparation for teaching a Foundations for Research Computing Bootcamp which is based on Software Carpentry.

Mostly they are just what I did to practice teaching. I don't intend to use them in class, but I'll have them handy in case something goes wrong. Where I've added a few improvements, workarounds, or just humor, that is also here. See, especially: 10-lunch.ipynb which demonstrates XKCD-style graphs.

Notebooks created during the class

There are 5 or 6 sloppy notebooks that I created while teaching the second half -- Teddy taught the first half. We intend to merge our repos at some point.

fed.ipynb was based on a discussion with one student after the class ended who wanted some hints on how to scrape data from the Federal Reserve. We googled some stuff and then I finished up getting it sort-of-working the next day.

International MacBook Keyboards

One or two students had non-US keyboards on their MacBooks. This led to problems finding some keys frequently used with the Unix Shell and Python such as ~ (tilde), and [] (square brackets). Also, some had difficulty with ' (single quote) and " (double-quote) marks. See this Apple Support page for information about international keyboard layouts and how to find those special keys.

(Those using Windows or Linux laptops who have had similar problems, please feel free to submit a PR to update this README.)

Accelerated Python

ColumbiaU_Accelerated_Python.ipynb is a Jupyter Notebook export of the Google Research Colab notebook for a workshop recently taught by Sameer (Sam) Ansari of Google. Some students had asked about that, since it was "sold out" and, also, novices were encourage to first learn the basics in the bootcamp.

Issues and Pull Requests Encouraged

For more practice with the skills learned, students are encouraged to submit Issues and/or Pull Requests to, respectively, complain about(:-) or improve these notebooks -- or just practice using git.