The Research Software Engineering Group at Lancaster offers various courses for PhD students and staff throughout the year. We provide skills development and training workshops in programming and software engineering with good (enough) practices. These are provided in multiple languages, including Python and R, and teach tools necessary for reproducibility and creating quality software such as Git/version control and Make.

This term's course timetable has now been released, and we are pleased to be able to return to in-person training in the Open Research space in the Library. We have four courses this term, one of the courses is spread over 4 days. All courses are free to attend, but sign-up is required. Details of each course are listed below.

Introduction to the Linux Command Line

This course will introduce you to the Linux command line and walk you through:

• Navigating files and directories
• Creating, copying, deleting and editing files
• Joining commands together to make them more powerful
• How to perform the same actions on many files (loops)
• Save commands and recipes in a file (scripting)
• Finding files

To find out more and sign up for the course, click this link

Version Control with Git

This course will introduce you to version control and Git.

Version control is the process of tracking and managing changes made to code. There are many tools for this, but the most popular is Git. We will use Git to introduce you to the basics of version control and then show you how to use several of Git's features. Specifically, this course will cover:

• Creating a repository, the place where our code s history is stored
• Adding files to the repository
• Making changes to our code and ensuring that they are tracked
• Exploring the history of our code and "gong back in time"
• Using Git to share your code with others.
• Collaborating with others and merging their changes into your code.

To find out more and sign up for the course, click this link

Plotting and Programming in Python

This course will introduce you to the Python programming language and programming by guiding you through reading data in from a file and plotting it.

This course is split over 2 days (10th and 24th of November)

This is a two-part course, the first part will cover:

• Variables and assigning values to them
• Data types
• Functions and built-in help
• How to use libraries/packages
• Reading in data
• DataFrames and manipulating your data
• Plotting

The Second day will cover:

• How to make a program do many things. (for and while loops.
• How do make the code do different things depending upon the data by using conditionals (if statements)
• How to process many data sets with a single command
• Re-using code, how to write functions
• How to make your code more readable.

To find out more and sign up for the course, click this link

Intermediate Git: Sharing and collaborating with GitHub

This course will show you how to take your usage of Git and Github to the next level by harnessing the power of GitHub for collaboration.

Have ever been confused about how to start a Pull Request or how to fork a repository and merge your changes back. Perhaps you know and want to gain confidence in doing so? This course will teach you how to collaborate using git, and give you an environment in which to practise.

Some of the things covered in the course will include:

• Pull Requests
• Forking and merging back into the original repository
• Notifying a repository of a bug (raising an issue)
• Continuous Integration with Git (running tests when you push changes to a repo)

To find out more and sign up for the course, click this link