Gentle hands-on introduction to Python programming

Date: 2-3 July 2020, 09:30 – 17:00
Venue: online course (extra edition for EPS)
Registration: fully booked already
Course fee: no cost involved
Maximum amount of participants: 25
Study load: 0.6 ECTS
Trainers:  James Collier (VIB Bioinformatics Core) & Tuur Muyldermans (VIB Bioinformatics Core & ELIXIR Belgium)

This course is organised over two full days. With the help of plenty hands-on exercises, you will get introduced into the different types of variables in Python, the peculiarities of Python and good programming habits. This course will provide you an ideal stepping stone for further developing programming skills in Python. Throughout the course we’ll stress the importance of ‘good programming practice’, such as clear variable names and adding comments to your code.

Objectives
– Learning the basics of Python programming: different variables, reading files, writing files, conditional statements.
– Being able to write a basic Python script from scratch.

Required skills
Aimed for people with no programming skills whatsoever.

About the trainers
Tuur Muyldermans is a bioinformatics trainer at the VIB Bioinformatics Core and ELIXIR Belgium. James Collier is a professional software developer with >10 years of experience working on software ranging from tiny embedded devices through to high-performance and web applications. He completed his PhD at Monash University on Australia and now works on scientific software within the VIB Bioinformatics Core.

Programme

Day 1 09:30 – 17:00

– Short introduction to programming and Python
– Print statement – showing what your program does.
– Variables and operators – how to do math
– Conditions – deciding what to do
– Loops – doing the same thing with different information
– Lists and tuples – how to handle a range of variables
– File reading and writing – getting hold of data and dumping your results

Day 2 09:30 – 17:00

– Functions – re-using the same bit of code
– Imports – what functions does Python provide?
– Dictionaries – organising your variables
– Plots- plotting basic figures with matplotlib

Registration & requirements
This special EPS edition of this course is already fully booked and there are already several people on the waiting list. If you are a EPS PhD candidate or EPS postdoc and want to be placed on the waiting list, please mail Susan Urbanus (susan.urbanus@wur.nl) with subject “waiting list Python course”. Please also keep an eye out for upcoming, regular editions of this course at the VIB webpage.
Selected participants will get a confirmation of their participation. The selected participants will receive a link for the online meeting on Discord and more information and instructions on how to install the required software on your own computer. Please note that the required software should be installed before the start of the course. If you have problems with installing the software, you can always ask one of the trainers for help, but please do so before the start of the course.