João is an agricultural engineer doing his masters in soil physics.
His programming experience is a first year programming course using C.
He was never able to use this low-level programming in his activities,
and never programmed after the first year.
His work consists of evaluating physical properties of soil samples
from different conditions. Some of the soil properties are measured by
an automated device that sends logs in a text format to his machine.
João has to open each file in Excel, crop the first and last quarters of
data values, and calculate an average.
Software Carpentry will show João how to write shell scripts to count
the lines and crop the right range for each file, and how to use R to
read these files and calculate the required statistics. It will also
show him how to put his programs and files under version control so that
he can re-run analyses and figure out which results may have been
affected by changes.
