Modern Plain Text Computing
  • Schedule
  • Content
  • Examples
  • Assignments

Schedule

Here’s an outline. It’s subject to change. There are up to three kinds of link each week.

  • Content (): These pages contain links to the readings and other material for each week. Read these before class. Lecture slide decks will also appear on these pages.

  • Example (): These pages contain annotated code and other supplementary information that you can use as a reference. It is also where any impromptu stuff we do in class will end up.

  • Assignment (): These pages contain the instructions for each problem set. Except in the first week, assignments from a Monday class are due by 6pm the following Friday.

Weekly Topics

Topic Content Examples Assignment
Week 1 Aug 25 Big Picture: Doing your work properly
Week 2 Sep 1 The file system and the shell
Week 3 Sep 8 Using R to look at data
Week 4 Sep 15 Tidy data and dplyr
Week 5 Sep 22 More on dplyr, tidyr, and related packages
Week 6 Sep 29 Ingesting and cleaning data
Week 7 Oct 6 Version Control: git and GitHub
Week 8 Oct 13 No class (Fall break)
Week 9 Oct 20 Iterating on Data and Models
Week 10 Oct 27 Databases and APIs
Week 11 Nov 3 Parallel Computing
Week 12 Nov 10 Helpers, build systems, and environments
Week 13 Nov 17 Packages, and LLMs
Week 14 Nov 24 TBD
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Content 2026 by Kieran Healy
See the About page page for credit information.

 

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