Software Carpentry is a volunteer organization whose goal is to make scientists more productive and their work more reliable by teaching them basic computing skills. Founded in 1998, it runs short, intensive workshops that cover program design, version control, testing, and task automation. In October 2014, we announced of the Software Carpentry Foundation to act as a governing body for the project.
Our core topics include the following:
- The basics of structured programming in Python or R
- Version control using Git, Mercurial, or Subversion
- Unit testing using an xUnit-style framework
- Automating tasks using the Unix shell.
Depending on the audience, workshops may also include an introduction to the following:
- Relational databases and SQL
- Regular expressions
- Numerical programming with NumPy.