This course will train students to process biological data sets by developing basic ‘command-line’ and script-based computing skills. Topics covered may include the UNIX file system, basic UNIX commands, running programs and building pipelines, abstraction and control flow in Python, regular expressions, and data exploration and visualization in R.

The objectives of this course are to provide students with diverse backgrounds in biology or the biomedical sciences and no prior experience with programming with a basic foundation in “applied bioinformatics”, e.g., processing data sets with open-source programs through a command line interface.