Introduction to Programming for Biologists. 3 Credit Hours

Catalog description

This course covers fundamentals of computer programming. It is designed and tailored for biologists in three ways: 1) students can pass it with minimal mathematical background, 2) when possible, examples and exercises are based on biological data analyses, and 3) it prepares students for other courses that are focused on bioinformatics techniques and tools. The topics are similar to the first introductory course that a student would take in a computer science program including: An introduction to Unix operating systems (i.e., Linux and macOS), basic command line and terminal usage; The Emacs text editor; Using simple data structures including vectors, matrices, lists, and classes; Conditional statements; Loops; Functions; Debugging; Organizing computational biology experiments and Code repositories and version control systems including Git. While this course is based on R, students are expected to be able to self-teach other high-level programming languages including Python, Mathlab, etc. after learning fundamentals of programming in this course. Students will learn skills that are essential for visualization, statistical analysis, machine learning, analyzing next generation sequencing data, and other bioinformatics analyses. Open for Cross Enrollment on Space Available Basis.