Teaching the “Linux for Scientists” course in Rotterdam
Running for two full days, the course aims to teach students with a background in the life sciences to work on a (remote) Linux server. No previous Linux or scripting knowledge is required, as I start from scratch: a bit of history and then “how to log in”. Over the course of the two days, we cover topics that include basic tools and utilities like ls
, moving on to grep
, etc. towards writing simple Bash script to help automate analyses and make them more reproducible.
The course consists of a combination of lectures in which I give some background and demonstrate how to use the various tools, and a series of practicals from which the students will learn the most: hands-on learning by doing. The book I wrote over the years can be found at thea DOI 10.5281/zenodo.1412441.
This will be the 13th year I’ll be teaching this course, something I didn’t expect when I started it back in 2010 (the two missing years were due to the COVID pandemic in 2020/2021). Every one of those years has been great fun. I love the interactions with the students, which are generally enthusiastic, open and ask lots of questions. A great attitude!