General introduction
What do you need
You will need to have access to a computer to follow this course.
Especially for the unix command line introduction, you will need to have access to a Unix terminal. If you are already on GNU/Linux, great! If you are on a Apple machine with MacOS, you already have a Unix machine, you should be good too. For the unfortunate who still have Windows installed on their machine, you still have several options:
- Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux on your Windows machine. You can choose another Linux distribution than the Ubuntu default. You will need to learn how to access Windows files (disk C:) from the WSL.
- Install a Linux virtual machine with VirtualBox on Windows
- install Linux on the machine in dual-boot
- Use Cygwin, which implement a collection of GNU utils on Windows.
- Use a JupyterLab instance on MyDocker from the University Paris-Saclay
- Create an account on CoCalc.com, create a project and open a shell. This option however prohibits the usage of Internet, which is limiting.
You will also need a text editor. One with proper syntax-highlighting is a must-have.
Miscellaneous
Enjoy programming and problem solving challenge? Try rosalind.info!
A note on large language models use throughout this course
The goal of this introduction to computer programming is to make you practice, not the machine. Even though Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, Claude or Mistral, to name a few, can be sometimes helpful, using them to answer to these programming exercises is counter-productive.