The Unix Workbench

He can totally catch up and keep up - the trick is to pick a problem/sub field where his background will give him a head start, then focus on that.

ComptiA+ is completely useless for most bioinformatics work - it’s honestly mostly a box ticking certification that’s useless outside of bioinformatics as well. (I used to work in IT. It’s “intended” for IT, but I never found people who had it to be better than people who didn’t.) A networking or architecture class might be interesting, from a first principles type of perspective, but it won’t help him catch up as far as current tools go.

I’d suggest pointing him toward Galaxy - it’s a web interface that includes a lot of different tools, so he can familiarize himself with how things work and look and what kind of data inputs and outputs go where without having to mess with the infrastructure side of things. (Which will be Linux, largely. A basic Linux/Unix command line class would be a good place for him to start, if he doesn’t have that background - Data Carpentry has good workshops, if there’s one near him, or there’s this coursera course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/unix)

There is definitely a market for independent consultants in the field, especially ones with your dad’s background. He can offer a lot because he should be able to know what the data mean in a way that lots of pure computational people do not. I would 100% encourage him to give it a try.

For learning git coursera seems to be helpful. Im doing this https://www.coursera.org/learn/unix and its pretty easy actually to start off with. Some git is covered in the last week week 4.

Actually you can probably breeze through this if you have a R/Python background.

That is the basics but you can do other more Git focused courses later. Shell scripting seems important in general though

First, you need to follow a shell training, otherwise, Linux is hell I must admit.

There is a nice one on coursera and it is free. Once you have learnt a bit of shell, Linux is much more manageable

Review of The Unix Workbench - A class work taking a peek at

Hey everyone I recently went through and completed most of The Unix Workbench on Coursera. It was a relatively new course so I thought I'd give it a shot (auditing it, not paying for the cert) and try to learn something new.

Disclaimer: I'm fairly familiar with Unix (I use Solus as my daily OS) but I'm fairly novice when it comes to terminal usage.

Generally, I thought that class gave a really good overview of the basics. If anyone wants to learn more about using the terminal to become more effective with whatever they're doing I'd say this is a good place to start.

Some of the commands it covers in include: ls, cd, mv, mkdir, touch, md5sum, grep, and egrep. It also covered the basics of bash programming: variables, loops, functions, etc.

Personally the two most useful things I learned were the apropos command and the basics of makefiles.

Heads up for anyone thinking of checking it out, it doesn't really have any videos with useful content. All of the commands and materials are just written in text. The videos just give a short overview of each "week" (which would probably take you around ~1 hour).

TL;DR: Good overview of unix commands, but all text based. I recommend giving it an "audit" for free if you're interested.

definitely complete this course if you’re eager and willing to learn.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/unix

“Most of the technologies discussed in this course will be accessed via a command line interface. Command line interfaces can seem alien at first, so this course attempts to draw parallels between using the command line and actions that you would normally take while using your mouse and keyboard. You’ll also learn how to write little pieces of software in a programming language called Bash, which allows you to connect together the tools we’ll discuss.”

I'm getting towards the end of a Ubuntu course offered on Coursera (its free) from Johns Hopkins University. its a great way to learn command line and doesn't assume you have any prior knowledge

https://www.coursera.org/learn/unix

https://www.coursera.org/learn/unix/

Learn Python the Hardway is a good start. Also I really enjoyed The Unix Workbench

What flavour (AIX, Solaris, HP-UX)? Typically a good book can go a long way (Unix Power Tools comes to mind)

Online training:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/unix

https://edoras.sdsu.edu/doc/unixtut/

Read about Unix, it'll answer all of your questions.

Also this book helped me a lot too!!

https://leanpub.com/unix

Its a included in The Unix Workbench course on Coursera.

Dont worry you dont really need a master in biotechnology to go straight to bioinformatics it just that for me it took me a while to find finally in the sea of things i liked the one that suited me better :) For the master, I studied in Madrid (Spain) this is the official page http://www.masterbioinformatica.com . It was a really nice one, even if really packed we were able to elarn a lot and the teachers were always available, they are always there to help even now :) Although is in spanish so you may find other programs in your country of origin where you can take the master. I won’t lie to you, if you don’t have any previous programming knowledge, coding is going to be HARD at the beginning, but seriously the more you try and fight with the code the more you will learn and it will come more naturally and fast, and I mean it that is what our teachers used to tell us and we looked at them with a high dose of scepticism but now i love it and you get better everyday and able to solve more complex things. But I will really recommend for you to begin preparing: 1. If you dont have a computer with a unix based/linux operative system (like Ubuntu or scientific linux) install it 2. Then the real first step will be to learn how to use the command line of linux ...(hopefully) or bash script. The commands like grep, sed, awk, head, wc... you should be able to use them they are extremely useful.  i saw this course that can be maybe helpful.... I have never taken a course on this but i am sure this one will be good https://www.coursera.org/learn/unix   2. So ...learning to code ... I dont know which programming languages they are gonna teach you but I suppose it will be R, python and /or Perl? going to  a. Codeacademy can be really nice for python and for sql. I took the python one :) https://www.codecademy.com b. for R there is a platform called shiny that many courses in R use to teach with explanations and is really nice to learn on it.. Some other courses that use this platform and have videos and a lot of explanations you will be able to find in coursera. I highly recommend some of johns hopkins university they are extremely well done   https://es.coursera.org/learn/r-programming https://www.coursera.org/learn/r-programming-environment   3. And the most important thing... there are thousand of answered questions about how to do things in bioinformatics you just need to ask google and check specific webpages. When u begin to get confortable with the amount of new info I recommend that you subscribe to biostars, R bloggers, stackoverflow... and many more so you can also follow news. And depending on your country of studying there should also be there some R users community or bioinformatic community that can be interesting to join to get info about seminars, courses…. Good luck with it!