Chapter 2 Preface

• as scientists, don’t have time to start from the beginning
• we need welcoming entryways
• a lot of wonderful tutorials out there to learn the thing you want. But what about when you don’t know exactly what you need? Or you want to streamline?
• this book tries to help you find entryways and think about what you need
• not a comprehensive list of choices but some well-worn pathways
• opinionated to limit choice (opinions by Lowndes and others — attribution identified)
• written for scientists by scientists

You’ll notice that tutorials might frame introductory lessons around either how the language works or how to use it. For example, two different introductory Python lessons from the Carpentries are framed around programming (i.e. how Python works) and on data analysis (i.e. how to use it). Both approaches are important and might provide entryways to learners with different motivations for learning: learning how it works might be helpful if you want to learn fundamentals so you can think of how to apply them, where as learning how to use it might be preferred if you have a specific project in mind.