Statistics 296: Resources for Statistical Computing

This course is designed to be an informal introduction to a wide variety of topics related to computing, specifically computing as it is carried out in the Statistical Computing Facility of the Department of Statistics at the University of California at Berkeley. The goal of the course is to make you aware of some of the resources available here, and to familiarize you with some of the terms and concepts you're likely to see and hear about both in the department and in the ``real world''.

Course Outline

Introduction to the Statistical Computing Facility
Operating Systems and Languages
Basic UNIX commands
Scientific Word Processing with LaTeX
The Internet and the World Wide Web
Electronic Mail
Survey of Statistical Languages (Splus, matlab, sas, etc.)
Text Processing Utilities

These topics, as well as the order in which they are presented, may change based on the needs and interests of the students enrolled in the class.

Please don't feel you are at a disadvantage if you've never used computers or the UNIX operating system before. This is the place where you're going to learn about these thing so that you'll feel comfortable with using them as a valuable tool in your coursework and independent study. Like anything involving the computer, the only way you'll actually learn anything is to use the computer. Although there is only one assignment (see below), I'll make suggestions throughout the course about things you can do to help you learn more about some of the topics.

Assignment

Your grade in the course will be based on a report which you will prepare on a topic of your choice. I expect the report to be properly formatted using a word processor like LaTeX. Your goal should be to prepare a report which another student could use to find out more about the topic you've covered. For example, you might write a report with descriptions of the resources available at the web pages of different statistics departments, a guide to help someone learn how to use the vi or emacs editors, a survey of available sources for data sets for analysis, or a comparison of the way some statistical technique is implemented in several of the statistical languages which are available in the SCF. As the semester progresses, please keep in mind the goals of the report, so that you will choose a topic in which you're really interested.

Phil Spector

spector@stat.berkeley.edu