Where to Make a Start

Those of you who have an iron self control will, of course, now read this entire manual from cover to cover! For those of you who can't wait that long (i.e. everybody) then your first step is to find a PC and start having fun. The next chapter, Getting Started, tells you how to use your PC in your office to access any machine you require. Once you have mastered the basics of connecting to networked computers, browse this manual for ideas on what to do next. You should aim to become proficient in each of the following areas unless you are certain that you are not going to need that particular skill:-

Cluster Access

From your PC you should be able to connect to UNIX server and display full screen output back on the local machine.

Web Access

Use of the web is now an essential part of everyday activity. It is highly unlikely that you are unfamiliar with any aspect of Web usage.

UNIX

You should be able to perform basic files operations. You should understand what environmental variables are and about aliases and what part the special files .login and .bashrc play in defining them. Knowing a little basic shell programming would also be useful.

There will be a lecture on our Linux (a form of UNIX) server .

Programming

An introductory course in Python and C++ will be given, as these are the most useful languages currently.

FORTRAN

Some older experiments still have a large FORTRAN code base. If FORTRAN is new to you then working through the FORTRAN introduction at:-

http://www-pnp.physics.ox.ac.uk/~gronbech/intfor/

would be a good idea. If you do know FORTRAN, why not take a crack at one of the exercises listed at the end of the FORTRAN introduction?

L^ATEX

L^ATEXis a document preparation system that is liked by some and loathed by others. However it is still used for papers and the chances are you will use it to write your thesis. There is a very brief introduction in 10.3.2. If you want to know more now, talk to your experiment colleagues.

Root

This is a general purpose analysis tool and framework that is mostly written in C++. It is heavily used to look at and manipulate experimental data.