The Problem

Many scientists and engineers spend much of their lives writing, debugging, and maintaining software, but only a handful have ever been taught how to do this effectively: after a couple of introductory courses, they are left to rediscover (or reinvent) the rest of programming on their own. The result? Most spend far too much time wrestling with software, instead of doing research, but have no idea how reliable or efficient their programs are.

The Solution

This site presents an intensive course on basic software development practices for scientists and engineers. Its aim is not to turn biochemists and mechanical engineers into computer scientists; instead, it introduces them to the 10% of modern software engineering that will satisfy 90% of their needs. The course has been taught at laboratories and universities in Canada and the United States since 1998. It is now being upgraded, and will be made freely available under an open license in the fall of 2005.

Status

This Nature article describes the course's background and goals in more detail.

See this page for known issues with the course.

Acknowledgments

This work has been made possible by a grant from the Python Software Foundation, and by support from the University of Toronto. See Acknowledgments for more details, and License for terms of re-use.

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Lectures