Teaching materials for scientists

[Charles Stanhope]

On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 1:56 PM, Greg Ward <greg at gerg.ca> wrote:
> Hi all --
>
> I seem to have volunteered to teach a bunch of physics grad students
> and postdocs the basics of version control with Mercurial. Do you know
> about any teaching materials I can "borrow" to get started? I suspect
> the audience differs from programmers in several ways:
>
>   * might never even heard of version control, never mind used it
>
>   * doesn't really care about the craft of writing maintainable
>     software -- the hook is more likely to be "get back the code that
>     worked last week, collaborate easily with your buddy/supervisor,
>     have an offsite backup"
>
>   * more likely to put giant binary data files into version control
>     rather than giant binary dependencies or build outputs...
>     it's still wrong, but differently wrong ;-)
>
>   * might be tempted to put small textual analysis results under
>     version control, which I strongly suspect is wrong
>
> BTW, any tips/ideas/insights into teaching Mercurial to scientists
> would be welcome.
>
> Thanks!

There may be useful resources here:

http://software-carpentry.org/

They describe themselves as "Software Carpentry helps researchers be
more productive by teaching them basic computing skills."