Our Target Audience
This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.
Some graduate students at the University of Toronto have asked us to run the course for them later this fall or during the winter. There's an obvious selection bias (if they were expert programmers, they wouldn't need this course), but I think they're pretty representative of scientists at their level:
| 01. | Name | 39/39 | 100% |
| 02. | Email address | 39/39 | 100% |
| 03. | Level of study | ||
| MSc | 12/39 | 30% | |
| PhD | 27/39 | 70% | |
| 04. | Primary programming language | ||
| MATLAB | 16/39 | 41% | |
| Python | 2/39 | 5% | |
| Other | 6/39 | 15% | |
| None | 15/39 | 39% | |
| 05. | Knowledge of primary language | ||
| Don't know how to use it | 28/39 | 72% | |
| Understand basic commands | 10/39 | 26% | |
| Can program competently | 1/39 | 2% | |
| Expert | 0/30 | 0% | |
| 06. | What other languages do you know? | ||
| HTML | 11/27 | 41% | |
| R | 4/27 | 15% | |
| Other (VB, Java, Perl, etc.) | 10/27 | 37% | |
| No answer | 12/39 | ||
| 07. | Would you like pre-class tutorial on | ||
| programming basics (loops, files, if/else)? | |||
| Yes | 36/39 | 92% | |
| No | 3/39 | 8% | |
| 08. | Do you have a laptop? | ||
| Yes | 39/39 | 100% | |
| No | 0/39 | 0% | |
| 09. | Preferred OS | ||
| Windows XP | 14/39 | 36% | |
| Windows Vista | 12/39 | 31% | |
| Mac OS X | 7/39 | 18% | |
| Linux/Unix | 9/30 | 0% | |
| 10. | Do you have a MATLAB license? | ||
| Yes | 9/39 | 23% | |
| No | 30/30 | 77% | |
| 11. | Which topics are you interested in? | ||
| Databases | 16/39 | 47% | |
| Functions and Modules | 14/39 | 41% | |
| Debugging | 10/39 | 29% | |
| Image Processing | 10/39 | 30% | |
| Object-Oriented Programming | 10/39 | 30% | |
| Web Application Programming | 9/39 | 26% | |
| GUI Programming | 8/39 | 23% | |
| Web Client Programming | 7/39 | 21% | |
| Computational Complexity | 6/39 | 18% | |
| How Web Servers Work | 6/39 | 18% | |
| Regular Expressions | 6/39 | 18% | |
| XML | 6/39 | 18% | |
| Automated Builds | 5/39 | 15% | |
| Sets and Dictionaries | 5/39 | 15% | |
| Unix Shell Scripting | 5/39 | 15% | |
| Binary Data | 3/39 | 9% | |
| Empirical Software Engineering | 3/39 | 9% | |
| Quality Assurance | 3/39 | 9% | |
| Unit Testing | 3/39 | 9% | |
| Version Control | 3/39 | 9% | |
| Software Development Lifecycles | 1/39 | 3% | |
| Other (please specify) | 10/39 | 30% | |