Coding resources

This page lists scientific coding resources, covering text editors, version control, Mac package managers, Python and Jupyter notebooks, bash(/shell) scripting, and X-ray data analysis. Please let me know if any links are outdated or if your favourite resource isn’t on here! (Do not contact me asking me to link to your vaguely-coding-related webpage that isn’t about astronomy or physics research software development.) If you’re looking for my blog post on installing HEAsoft, click here.

Text Editors


Git: Version Control Software


Package Managers

**Note: Only use ONE of these!!**


Python

Learning

Documentation

Jupyter (/iPython) notebooks

  • Anaconda comes with Jupyter notebooks installed!
  • Project Jupyter blog, for interactive computing. I really like this for exploratory data analysis (usually with a small sample/training set of data) and visualization.

Bash Scripting

(Pupdate: macOS 10.15+ has switched to zsh as its default shell) I use bash rather than c-shell or tc-shell. It seems to have the most support and is the most widely-used.


X-ray Data Analysis

NICER

RXTE

XMM-Newton

XSPEC

Interactive Spectral Interpretation System (ISIS)


Other

(Header image: Wikimedia Commons)