Command line basics
What's important versus not important
Are you a wet lab person who thinks maybe she wants to learn some informatics tools? Congratulations! Molecular biology is a quantitative science now. Trying to resist it is like a physicist resisting computers in the 1970s.
Can you do it? Of course you can. I went from pure wet lab with no computational experience whatsoever to half wet/half dry in a few years, and didn't even start until my late 30s.
The first stretch is hard - your brain will hurt - and this is because getting comfortable with the environment really is about as much work as learning a new language. It's worth it: once you get going, you'll experience a freedom to ask questions, and answer them fast, that you never thought possible. I can't overstate how much doing this has changed me as a scientist.
Below, find sections about the various things that have been useful to me. I hope they help you too.
- Precise typing
- Working at the command line
- For God's sake, look at the data
- Finding the solution all on your own
- Using your laptop as a remote control
- How to perform reality checks
- Mixing and matching datasets