Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Slides for Introduction to Python

As I mentioned, I'm planning to teach an introductory course on Bioinformatics next spring, something like "Bioinformatics for Biologists." The target audience is graduate students in Microbiology and other fields of molecular biology. My thought is that we have too few biologists who are doing Bioinformatics compared to the hordes of CS, math and statistics types. We don't necessarily need more tools, just train people to use simple ones well. I'm planning to use Python a lot in the course for simulations and demos of algorithms.

So I'm working on an introductory lecture about Python. The problem is, I don't have time to teach the students to really use Python. I'm guessing I can probably spend 6 hours on both Python and basic math. I hope I can cover enough in these few hours to allow students to understand my examples. Anyway, I have posted the slides for part of this to .Mac, but be warned that it is a 4.4 MB pdf. I hope that most of it will be comprehensible without the narration.

I have learned an enormous amount from other people's slides on the web. Sadly, there seems to be a trend to requiring a University login to see them. On the other hand, I would gladly post all of my lecture slides but I can't without careful attention, because I shamelessly steal images from the web to illustrate them. I call that Fair Use, but it wouldn't be fair anymore if I distributed them to the web.