UCS Training Programme Lent Term 2010

This course which is a follow up from the Excel Further Use course, covers some more advanced features of Excel 2007. The course will be taught using Excel 2007 on PCs (Windows XP) but Macintosh users of Excel 2008 should also find it useful.

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 describes how patterns in text strings can be matched using regular expressions. A number of programming and scripting languages (such as Python, Perl, and Java) and other applications (such as Apache, PHP, Exim, and some text editors) support the use of regular expression patterns. Although there are some differences between the different implementations, there is also a lot in common.

The course has been modified and extended from the one previously given by Philip Hazel, the author of the PCRE ("Perl Compatible Regular Expressions") library, one of the standard and widely used regular expression libraries. The extensions are: Python and Java to the same level as Perl and PCRE; more warnings about problem areas, background usage and programming hints; and a short section on true (computer science) regular expressions and their uses when transferring data between programs.

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

Please note that this course is NOT suitable for beginner or novice shell scripters. It is also NOT suitable for those who do not have significant practical experience of writing (or trying to write) their own shell scripts.

The purpose of this workshop is to give attendees the opportunity to ask questions about any problems they have encountered in trying to write their own shell scripts in bash, and to obtain advice on how to tackle more complex shell scripting tasks. It is unlikely to be of use to attendees who do not have some experience of writing shell scripts for their own purposes.

It is essential that those attending the workshop have thought of some questions to ask the presenters, or of some scenarios/problems they wish to explore with the presenters, prior to attending.

The intended audience of this workshop is those who have previously attended the Unix Shell Scripting course.

The course is designed to give a overview of some of the advanced features of Microsoft Word 2007, principally for staff who produce reports or long documents. This is is very similar to Word 2007: Mastering Dissertations and Theses (Level 3) which is aimed more at students so please do not book on both courses.

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 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.

This two-part course will describe good-practice aspects of designing, building and running a web site, and providing information on a web server. The requirements for providing accessible web pages, utilising the site-wide search engine on your web pages and liaising with a web design company are also covered.

In addition, Helen Sargan runs an "access/site design clinic" with information providers on a one-to-one basis: please contact her directly to make an appointment.

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

This course introduces the concept of checkpointing - the saving of a program's state while the program is running, such that the program can be restarted from that saved state - and describes how to implement application-level checkpointing for certain types of scientific programming tasks in Python. Attendees will benefit most from this course if they have a clear idea of the types of task which they wish to checkpoint prior to attending.