UCS Training Programme Easter Term and Long Vacation 2010

LaTeX is a powerful document description language built on top of TeX. It is available on Unix, Windows and Macintoshes. It can be used for the presentation of plain text (including accented characters and letters outside the English alphabet), the typesetting of mathematics, the generation of tables, and producing simple diagrams. It is particularly suited for the writing of theses, papers and technical documents.

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

No previous experience of shell scripting is required for this course; however some knowledge of the interactive use of the bash shell is a prerequisite (see Simple Shell Scripting for Scientists: Prerequisites for details).

This course introduces shell scripting in bash for scientific computing tasks. Day one introduces very basic shell scripts in bash which process the command line in a simple fashion. Day two covers how to write more advanced shell scripts in bash. Day three covers how to make one's shell scripts more robust.

At the end of each day one or more exercises are set. It is VERY IMPORTANT that attendees attempt these exercises before the next day of the course. Attendees should make sure that they have allowed themselves sufficient study time for these exercises between each day of the course.

CPPD offer a 1 day intensive course Presentation Skills: An Introduction which is more suitable for university staff.

This course is open to all members (staff and students) of the University.

It teaches the skills necessary to deliver more successful presentations. It is designed to offer you the opportunity to pick up tips and tricks for better planning, to think about creating or sourcing a range of appropriate visual aids, and how to improve your delivery technique. Participants will not be asked to present.

Initially there will be a talk and demonstration then there will be an opportunity to try out any techniques you have learned about. To this end, if you are interested in looking at analytics for your own site and you haven't yet obtained a code and installed it on your pages, you will need to do that before the course. If you are interested in interpreting data that is already being collected you won't have to worry about that. Bear in mind that there is a lag in data collection of 24 hours.

Do you want to create more professional publications by having a deeper appreciation of what Publisher 2007 can do for you? Through a series of graded exercises this course focuses on practical work giving you ample opportunity to use your PC skills to produce various publications.

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

This course will cover the important programming tasks that used to be messy or complicated in Fortran 77, and can be done more cleanly and effectively in modern Fortran (i.e. Fortran 90/95/2003). It is intended for people who have been using Fortran for many years, but have not been following the recent standards. It is also intended for people who have an older, but still valid, Fortran program and want to clean it up and make it easier to understand and maintain. It will cover only aspects of old Fortran (i.e. Fortran 77) that can be improved by replacing them, and not the totally new aspects.

Microsoft Excel is the chosen spreadsheet package as it is a popular choice, both on Macintosh and PC.

This course is a task-focused version of the "Mastering Advanced Features" course. It is designed to give a overview of the advanced features of Microsoft Word 2007 that are most relevant to producing dissertations, theses and other long documents.

This course is designed for users new to the software who need to create various types of chart including organisational charts, Gantt charts and flowcharts. The skills and knowledge acquired in this course are sufficient to be able to use and operate the software at an efficient level and covers from beginners to intermediate skills. It is fast paced.

This two-part course will build on the simple style sheets produced in the introductory courses. The aim is to give you a full appreciation of how stylesheets work and how to work with them, and using them as an integral part of producing web pages and sites.

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

This is a detailed overview of using parallelism for achieving more computation in the same amount of elapsed time, covering both "shared memory" and "distributed memory" designs. It will concentrate on principles rather than details, to help attendees make the right decision and proceed in the right direction. It is aimed at users with significant programming experience who need more computation power than can be delivered by a single thread of execution on a single CPU core, including those who already program in parallel. The course is also designed for system administrators who need to support parallel codes, by describing the range of practical options, and their strengths, weaknesses, configuration issues and other important issues.

This two-part course will build on the simple style sheets produced in the introductory courses. The aim is to give you a full appreciation of how stylesheets work and how to work with them, and using them as an integral part of producing web pages and sites.

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

This is a detailed overview of using parallelism for achieving more computation in the same amount of elapsed time, covering both "shared memory" and "distributed memory" designs. It will concentrate on principles rather than details, to help attendees make the right decision and proceed in the right direction. It is aimed at users with significant programming experience who need more computation power than can be delivered by a single thread of execution on a single CPU core, including those who already program in parallel. The course is also designed for system administrators who need to support parallel codes, by describing the range of practical options, and their strengths, weaknesses, configuration issues and other important issues.

This hands-on course is a follow up from the Excel 2007 Introduction course.

Stata is a powerful general purpose statistical package.

This course is for beginners and fairly new users of the package. Basic concepts and use of Stata will be introduced. The main aim of the course is to give participants a foundation and some background. However statistical techniques are not covered (see note below).

The first session looks at an overview of the Stata system and getting data into Stata format and the second looks at reporting, graphing and analyses. It is strongly recommended for anyone likely to use Stata for any but the very simplest analysis of the very simplest data.