Software Carpentry - Very Good Place to Learn Scientific Programming

We are adding few new links to our top level list of blogs and forums. They are good places to start your learning experience of various aspect of bioinformatics.

1. Software Carpentry: Software Carpentry by Greg Wilson appears to be a good place to start learning about scientific programming. We requested Greg to add a bit more, but here is their mission statement -

Our mission is to help scientists be more productive by teaching them basic computing skills. Our approach combines short, intensive workshops with self- paced online instruction. The benefits are more reliable results and higher productivity: a day a week is common, and a ten-fold improvement isnt rare.

Edit. Greg responded to my email within 90 seconds, and sent the following 90-second pitch on software-carpentry !!

2. Rosalind: Rosalind teaches about algorithms through problem solving. We wrote about Rosalind Project earlier.

3. Molecularevolution and Openhelix: We wrote about online tutorials on Velvet, Bowtie and Abyss at molecularevolution website.

We also wrote earlier about Openhelix, which has many excellent tutorials to start learning how to use bioinformatics tools.

4. Simply Statistics blog: The blog by Rafael Irizary and colleagues needs no introduction. It is among the best online resources to learn statistics and stay up to date with cutting edge thoughts.

5. Haldane’s Sieve: It is a new blog by three revolutionaries - Graham Coop, Bryan Howie and Joe Pickrell - to discuss preprints in population and evolutionary genomics. Why do we call them revolutionaries? It is simply because they see the world changing from locked up publishing to open-source publishing, and doing something to stay ahead of the curve.

We plan to write more about Haldane’s Sieve in a separate blog post.