Rating: Excellent
Strong Points: Full course materials, including lecture videos and project instructions, are freely available
Writing and executing computer code can feel like a black box, especially if you’re thrown into it as a life scientist without knowing any of the fundamentals of computer science. Luckily, Software Carpentry is available to both help you get started and fully understand what your code is actually doing. The website offers numerous online courses that provide a great overview of how to write successful code, with topics such as best practices for storing data, how to understand what a function is doing, and how to write your code so that it’s readable for yourself and others in the future. All lessons are freely available on the website, cover common languages used in scientific computing, and many even provide actual datasets to ground the lessons in real world examples. Software Carpentry is an excellent resource for novice coders who want to implement best practices in their data analysis right away.