"Pragmatic Programming" is a course which was designed for new postgraduate students and members of staff in Geographical Sciences.

As well as being available year round on this wiki, the course is also given every year as series of monthly practicals starting in the Autumn term. The idea is to have a regular monthly programming skills session over the first year of a PhD. The course is open to postgraduates and postdocs in Geographical Sciences and elsewhere. If you are interested in attending the course, please contact the administrators.

Rationale

A few years back, there was a short course for physical geography postgraduate students providing core computer skills required for the many modelling activities in the department. It covered briefly the Linux operating system, Fortran programming and the use of numerical libraries. Although this course stopped a while ago, there is still a clear and vocalised need for that type of tuition today.

"Pragmatic Programming" was designed to fill that gap. The course was written specifically for Geographical Sciences postgrads and postdocs but will be relevant to many researchers. Since Fortran is used widely across physical geography research groups today, Fortran has been chosen as the main programming language. However, if demand is sufficient it would be possible to add an element on C/C++.

Credits

"Pragmatic Programming" was designed in 2008 by JP Renaud and Gethin Williams.

The design and running of the course is financed using is Roberts Skills money.

Course content

• Linux1
• Fortran1
• Linux2
• Fortran2
• Condor
• Make
• Debugging
• Subversion
• Profiling
• Numerics
• Parallel
• Polyglot
• Using NetCDF