Initial Setup

MacOS

Most servers in the world run on Linux and when it comes to software engineering, machine learning and bioinformatics, Linux is the preferred operating system.

I have developed this course with a focus on MacOS as that is my main machine. I find for coding on MacOS is much easier as MacOS was originally based on UNIX and the terminal is similar to modern Linux distros. If you are using Windows, I recommend using WSL2 to run Ubuntu for example. The windows terminal has its own commands.

When I first got into coding, I was predominantly using Windows so am familiar with it. I no longer have a Windows machine and cannot test this material on Windows at the moment.

Before we get started we need to get your machine set up with the necessary tools. We will be using Python 3.12, VSCode, and GitHub to start with. In the future, I will plan to support Windows as well.

Prerequisites

• Install Python 3.12 https://www.python.org/ (we are going to use 1 version from the latest to avoid package compatibility issues, current version is 3.13 as of writing)
• Install VSCode https://code.visualstudio.com/
• Set up a GitHub account http://github.com
• Check Git is installed by running git --version, if not install it https://git-scm.com/