Event
Workshop: Introduction to programming
10 - 11 April 2017
Humanities Bridgeford Street Building, University of Manchester
There is more to programming than simply writing lines of code. This workshop will provide you with a basic set of skills which are aimed at making the coding process more effective, less error prone and more maintainable.
This workshop is intended for researchers who are looking to obtain a basic understanding of the approach to be taken when designing a program as well as actually writing small programs to solve specific problems.
The format of the workshop will be a mixture of PowerPoint presentations and hands-on practical exercises using the Python programming language, open source datasets and social sciences datasets from the UK Data Service.
This workshop will provide an overview of:
Day 1
- Specifying the problem to be solved
- Creating flowcharts and pseudo-code
- Documentation
- Basic Python coding constructs
- Testing and debugging
- Processing data from files
Day 2
- Creating functions and using parameters
- Introduction to object oriented programming
- Introduction to the Pandas and Matplotlib Python packages.
- Creating and running complete programs
This course will be of interest to those in social science research who have previous experience with writing SPSS or Stata code but with no formal training in programming. It is free to attend and refreshments, but not lunch, will be provided. Lunch can be purchased from nearby cafes or you can bring your own.
Level: Introductory
Experience/knowledge required: The course is aimed at those who have experience of using commands in statistics packages such as R, SPSS or Stata but who have no formal programming experience
Target audience: Social science researchers interested in coding