Do I need to have programming experience to join

Q: Do I need programming experience to join Bioinfo Soc?

There are people at all levels of life science who don't have programming experience, from undergrads, up to postdocs and senior researchers. You should be fine without it for the first workshop for example, where we will just be learning about git, a code management/sharing tool.

However for most future workshops the programming will be more advanced, so some knowledge would be needed. If you really want to get into it there's plenty of online material to get you started, but unfortunately we can't teach you the very basic stuff.

Where to get started:

• Codecademy
  Very nice introduction to most programming languages. If you want to come to our workshops we recommend the command line tutorial and the Python course.

• Resources for learning bioinformatics (discussion thread with links)

• Coursera.org free online courses:

  • Bioinformatics: Life Sciences on Your Computer
  • Bioinformatic Methods I
  • Python [Programming] for Genomic Data Science
  • Interactive Python Programming - teaches you to make a simple game (this may or may not be up your street!)

  More advanced:

  • Bioinformatics Algorithms I
  • Stanford - Computer Science 101

We will be posting tutorials here at some point, on topics such as setting up a Windows VM to access the Unix command line^?

See also:

• Q: What is bioinformatics and where can I read more about it?