This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.
Today was all about the Unix shell: Karen Reid covered a wide range of topics, often using live examples. Some of the students had never used a command-line prompt before, so all of the material was new; others already knew their way around pretty well, but Karen's explanations filled in some gaps and made sense out of what had, for some of them, seemed like arbitrary magic.
Tomorrow morning, Paul Lu is going to introduce them to Make. We're going to spend the afternoon working on the students' own problems, which range from automating workflows to visualization with VTK to manipulating geographical data with GRASS. There may also be some ice cream...