Lesson 1 - Getting started

Learning Objectives

Concepts - After completing this lesson, students will be able to:

• Compare and contrast computer code meaning and syntax
• Identify common "algorithms" used in their daily lives

Skills - After completing this lesson, students will be able to:

• Navigate their computer's file system using a command line interface
• Clone, commit to, and push from a git repository
• Use the julia REPL to do basic arithmatic

Assignments - This lesson is complete when students have:

• Completed the BISC195 entrance survey
• Completed the BISC195 pretest
• Read the Preface and Chapter 1 of Think Julia
• Installed visual studio code and julia on their computers
  • Windows users should also have installed Windows Terminal
• Run all code examples from Lesson 1 on their own computers

This file contains instructions for completing today's lesson. It is written in a language called "markdown", which allows plain text to be easily converted into nicely formatted webpages like the one you're looking at now. But we'll come back to this.

To complete this lesson, follow the instructions below.

First steps

Most modern computer code is just text that tells a computer what to do. The part that is complicated is that code tends to be:

1. Literal - the computer can only do exactly what you specifically tell it; it won't try to guess your meaning and it doesn't understand nuance.
2. Procedural - you must provide all of the commands and you must provide them in the correct order

Watch this video to get a sense of why this matters so much.

In this course, we'll be primarily interacting with that computer code as plain text, but there are a bunch of tools that people have built to make that job a bit easier.

Installing your IDE

One of those tools is an "Integrated Development Environment" or "IDE". This is basically just a text editor with a bunch of bells and whistles.

There are a number of different text editors to chose from, but in this course, we're going to use Visual Studio Code

1. Click here and select the correct download for your operating system

   

2. Open the downloaded file and follow the prompts to install the program

Installing julia

In this course, we're primarily going to be programming in the julia programming language. Julia is a modern programming language designed for scientific computing.

1. Go to the julia downloads page and select the correct download for your operating system.

   

2. Open the downloaded file and follow the prompts to install it.

   1. Mac users, once the .dmg file is opened, you will need to drag the app file into your Applications folder
   2. Windows users - there will be a .exe file - open it to start the installation.

3. Once the julia application is installed, open it. This should cause a text window to open looking something like this:

               _
   _       _ _(_)_     |  Documentation: https://docs.julialang.org
  (_)     | (_) (_)    |
   _ _   _| |_  __ _   |  Type "?" for help, "]?" for Pkg help.
  | | | | | | |/ _` |  |
  | | |_| | | | (_| |  |  Version 1.4.0 (2020-03-21)
 _/ |\__'_|_|_|\__'_|  |  Official https://julialang.org/ release
|__/                   |

julia>

Type 2+2 and hit enter, you should see the number 4, and then another julia prompt:

julia> 2+2
4

julia>

You can close the window in the normal way, or type exit() and hit enter.

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