Part 1:
Before you start to code, you need to understand the entire process of designing and writing a program. A lot of times, taking just a few minutes to think about what you are going to do, and how the program will run, can save you hours of time later on to get your program to run right!
After reading the text book, answer these questions and engage your fellow students in discussion:
1- What are the key stages in designing a program?
2- Discuss the importance of program design and the role of pseudocode in the design process.
Part 2:
UnixLinux is an operating system (OS) just like Windows. Unix was the very first OS in fact! A number of the Bioinformatics tools and programs run solely on Linux. Studying this OS in detail however requires a course on its own! But I do encourage you to install Linux on your own and just play around with it. It has become very user friendly (used to be totally command prompt driven in my day!). At the very minimum you will come to appreciate this very nice and eloquent OS. Installing Linux is optional for this course, you can certainly do a lot if not all your bioinformatics programming in Windows. In fact a lot of bioinformatics tools are now available on the cloud (see usegalaxy.org) that don’t even require you to have a workstation! Just a dummy terminal with good internet connection will do!
There are many “flavors” of Linux, the most popular is Ubuntu, which you can download from here:
Another popular flavor is Fedora:
Windows also has a shell to run Linux commands these days, you can find it in the Microsoft store. Mac OS is technically a UNIX based OS, so you don’t need to install Linux if you have a Mac.
The question here is the following: Contrast and compare UnixLinux with Windows and tell us which one you think is better after your comparison. Engage your fellow students in discussion AFTER you post your own answer. If you’ve installed Linux tell us about your experience and whether you had any problems.
APA format, in-text citation, 2 pages, references include
