What Can I Do with the Things I Learn in This Class?

Computers are great at some things humans find difficult:

This course is good preparation for later programming courses.

What the Course Will be Like:

The C Programming Language

Gnuplot

About the Tools We'll Use:

All of the tools we'll use in this class are free! You can use them even after you leave UVa, and you can pass them along to other people. (Spread your knowledge!)

The programming language you'll learn is called C, and a smattering of C++. The C language and its cousins like C++ are the most popular programming languages in use today. You'd be hard-pressed to find a program on your computer that isn't written in one of these languages. Much of the software written for scientific research is also written in these languages.

Even if you move on to other languages, learning C will give you a firm foundation in the concepts shared by all programming languages. In fact, many other languages have adopted C-like syntax, and will be comprehensible to C programmers.

The particular version of C you'll be using is GNU C, which is available for free for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

For making graphs, we'll learn to use Gnuplot. Gnuplot is a versatile plotting program that's easy to use and can create publication-quality graphs. It's capable of making 2- and 3-dimensional graphs, and it can even find best-fit parameters to match a mathematical model to a set of data.

I hope to see you in PHYS 1660 this Fall!