Research software development tutorials

Introduction

This documentation provides tutorials for understanding the key aspects of software development for researchers. Tutorials are provided for different levels of experience.

Why are these tutorials needed?

There are many tutorials available on the web for understanding software development, however, they typically only consider specific aspects of software development. More general tutorials are often lengthy and cover more detail than required for student developers who are under time constraints (e.g. Masters and PhD students). Our philosophy is to provide curated links to existing documentation (emphasising reuse), with gaps filled in as required.

Contents:

• Beginner tutorials
  • 1. The Linux terminal
  • 2. Programming languages
  • 3. Software development environments
  • 4. Managing source code
  • 5. Documenting software projects
  • 6. Testing code
  • 7. Best practices
• Intermediate tutorials
  • 1. Interacting with google sheets and google drive via python
  • 2. Documenting source code with Doxygen
  • 3. Accelerating computation with numba
• Advanced tutorials (TBC)
• FAQs and Tips
  • Useful Python Commands
  • reStructuredText with Sphinx FAQ
  • Markdown with Sphinx FAQ
• Contributing (TBC)
  • References
  • Building and publishing Docker images to DockerHub

Tools for running these tutorials

To assist with running these tutorials, we have setup a container-based development environment to help researchers develop software for their projects. This development environment includes commonly used IDEs including PyCharm, Visual Studio Code, and JupyterLab and can be run on Linux, Mac, or Windows. This provides a replicable sandboxed environment for you to develop your software. For more information, see the software development environment section of the beginner tutorials.

The instructions for running these IDEs within a container can be found in the software development container documentation.

Contributors

• Thiranja Prasad Babarenda Gamage

• Chinchien Lin