This is the website for Ethan White’s programming and database management courses designed for biologists. At the moment there are four courses being taught during Fall 2014.
The goal of these courses is to teach biologists how to use computers more effectively to make their research easier. We avoid a lot of the theory that is taught in introductory computer science classes in favor of covering more of the practical side of programming that is necessary for conducting research. In other words, the purpose of these courses is to teach you how to drive the car, not prepare you to be a mechanic.
The development of these courses, and this site, have been supported by an NSF CAREER award intended to improve the use of computational tools in biology. It is also my hope developing these courses in an open and collaborative manner will make it possible to team up with other like minded biologists and programmers to tackle the challenge of training biologists to more effectively use available computational resources. As part of this effort these course actively integrate with Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry.