Presents for the Holidays

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Some of the best presents I have ever received have been recommendations: "Oh, you'd like this author," or, "You really should listen to this album." So, in the holiday spirit, please take a moment and share (in the comments) some pointers to computational resources that you think deserve to be better known. To get the ball rolling, I'm having fun playing with Ruffus, a simple Python library for constructing pipelined workflows. I'd also recommend Jonathan Weiner's Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior. It's ostensibly a biography of Seymour Benzer (who spent his entire career exploring how genes determine behavior), but it's actually the best description I've ever read of how a successful long-lived research program actually works.