πŸ—“οΈ Week 03 - Git, GitHub and Markdown

Theme: Behind the scenes

Author

Dr. Jon Cardoso-Silva

This week, we start coding. We start the week in the labs with a tutorial on Git and GitHub. You will also learn about the Markdown language, which is used to format text in GitHub and Jupyter notebooks. You will need to use this language in your assignments as well as in your final project.

In the lecture, we will revisit the discussion of file formats, but this time, we will focus more on how to manipulate these files in Python and pandas. We will do all of this using Jupyter notebooks to document your work.

πŸ“š Week 03 Preparation

Before coming to the labs and lectures this week, you must install the software listed on the πŸ“‹ Getting Ready page. If you have any issues with the installation, please use the #help-installation channel on Slack to get help from your peers and the teaching team.

πŸ“ƒ Lecture Schedule

πŸ“Location: Thursday 1 February 2024, 4 pm - 6 pm at MAR.1.04

πŸ‘¨β€πŸ« Lecture Material

Part 1: More Git and GitHub

Don’t worry, you’re not alone if you feel lost with all the git commands from the lab. It takes time to understand the nuances between git add, git commit, and git push. The key is practice, and that’s what we’ll do in the first hour of this lecture.

We will use the following GitHub repository:

LINK TO GITHUB REPOSITORY (I will give you permission to access it during the lecture)

We’ll reinforce some of these concepts plus learn new ones, including:

  • Branching: Explore different versions of your work without affecting the main one.
  • Pull requests: Propose changes to the main project for review and merging.
  • GitHub Pages: Convert your markdown files into a website.

Get ready to practice!

Throughout the lecture, we’ll clone a repository, experiment with branches, write markdown, commit and push changes, create pull requests, and see the merged results come to life on a GitHub page.

Part 2: File Formats & Data Wrangling

In the second hour, we’ll use VS Code and Jupyter Notebooks to learn how to manage different file formats with Python’s pandas library.

We’ll dive into:

  • VS Code setup: Prepare your environment for coding and data analysis.
  • Terminal & Python integration: Learn how to use the terminal within VS Code to run Python commands.
  • Jupyter Notebook: Discover this interactive environment for exploring data and creating code.
  • File formats: Use pandas to efficiently read and write various file types like CSV and JSON.

Note: The notebook below is also available in the GitHub repository shared at the beginning of the lecture.

πŸŽ₯ Looking for lecture recordings? You can only find those on Moodle, typically a day after the lecture. If you can’t find the recordings, please contact πŸ“§ .