README.md

Programming course

The course is targeted at PhD students, Postdocs, or anyone willing to learn how to program in Python. Students are assumed to have some experience with programming, but not necessarily in Python, and the UNIX shell. In addition, they should bring their own laptops for the practical sessions.

Coordinates

• Date: 27-30 November, 2017
• Time: 9:00 - 17:00
• Location: J1-83
• Teachers:
  • Sander Bollen
  • Jonathan Vis
  • Mark Santcroos
  • Guy Allard
  • Mihai Lefter
• Registration via www.medgencentre.nl. Direct access to the registration form.

Program and Materials

• Mornings: presentations.
• Afternoons: assignments.

Day	Time	Lesson	Teacher
Tuesday, 27/11	9-10	Welcome, Introduction to Python (1)	Mihai
	10-11	Introduction to Python (2)	Mihai
	11-12	Introduction to Python (3)	Mihai
	12-13	Lunch break
	13-16	Practical session	Mihai, Sander, and Guy
Wednesday, 28/11	9-10	Assignments review
	10-11	More Python Goodness (1)	Mihai
	11-12	More Python Goodness (2)	Mihai
	12-13	Lunch break
	13-16	Practical session	Mihai, Sander, and Mark
Thursday, 29/11	9-10	Assignments review
	10-11	Object-oriented programming	Jonathan
	11-12	Jupyter Notebook	Mark
	12-13	Data mangling with pandas	Mark
	12-13	Lunch break
	13-16	Practical session	Mihai, and Mark
Friday, 30/11	9-10	Assignments review
	10-11	Data visualisation (1)	Guy
	11-12	Data visualisation (2)	Guy
	12-13	Biopython	Sander
	12-13	Lunch break
	13-16	Practical session	Mihai, Sander, and Guy

Some of the lessons are slideshows, whereas others are just notebooks we scroll through during class. The links above are all one-page static renderings on IPython Notebook Viewer.

Assignments

• First day.
• Second day.
• Third day:
  • OOP.
  • pandas.
• Final day:
  • Visualization 1.
  • Visualization 2.

Software installation

See the instructions here.

Notebooks

We apply some custom styling to the notebooks (e.g., body width, font), which is loaded in the last cell. This loads styles/notebook.css and styles/notebook.js.

A variant styles/notebook.css.small is provided that is more suitable for use on low-resolution displays. To use it, manually change the reference to this file in the bottom cell, and rerun it.

Slideshows

The sources for the slideshows are also IPython notebooks and you can edit them by starting a notebook server:

ipython notebook

Choose Slideshow in the Cell Toolbar menu.

Some aditional information on editing slides in the Notebook can be found here in this presentation.

We also apply some custom styling to the slideshows, which is loaded in the last cell.

Live rendering of the slides

You can use nbconvert to convert the slides to HTML and serve them. For example:

ipython nbconvert --to slides --post serve numpy.ipynb

This will open the slides in a new browser window. If you don't want that, add this argument:

--ServePostProcessor.open_in_browser=False

To serve on another IP address than the default 127.0.0.1, use the ip configuration of the serve postprocessing. For example, to listen on all IP addresses:

--ServePostProcessor.ip=0.0.0.0

Changing the port can be done similarly with port.

By default, the reveal.js library is loaded over the internet from a CDN. I think it's usually not a good idea to rely on internet connectivity for your slides, so you can also place a copy of reveal.js on your local computer and specify the location like this:

--reveal-prefix reveal.js

This would look for the reveal.js library in the reveal.js directory. A Git submodule is already setup for this, so you can just do:

git submodule init
git submodule update

(Unfortunately, there are other online dependencies such Font Awesome, so without an internet connection, not everything will look ok, but it will work.)

Also, if you just want to compile the slides to HTML without serving them to your browser, leave out the --post serve argument.