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CIS 199

Scripting Languages for Computational Science

Winter 2008

This course will be a practical introduction to programming in a scripting language. Students will learn the basics of programming in Ruby, techniques for writing scripts for Unix and other operating systems, and how to have their scripts interact with a wide variety of software used in computational science, including web servers and local and remote databases.

No prior experience with programming is required.

This course should be helpful for:

undergraduate science majors: if you’ve always wanted to learn a little bit about programming but don’t have enough time for the full introductory CIS sequence this course will give you an idea of what programming is about and skills to write basic programs you can use in your other courses

grad students and postdocs: you definitely don’t have the time to take one or two years of CIS courses and you have a lot of data to gather and analyze NOW; by the time you finish this course you will have working programs you can use in your research

pre-CIS majors: the CIS department recommends students have some programming experience before starting the major sequence (CIS 210-211-212), and this course will give you that experience.