Introduction

Preface

I love data! I love data because, insight into a data can save valuable time and lives! I know that Bash may not the best way to handle all kinds of data! but, there often comes a time when you are provided with a pure Bash environment, such as what you get in the common Linux based super computers and you just want an early result or view of the data before you drive into the real programming, using Python, R and SQL, SPSS, and so on. Expertise in these data-intensive languages also comes at the cost of spending a lot of time on them. In contrast, bash scripting is simple, easy to learn and perfect for mining textual data! Particularly if you deal with genomics, microarrays, social networks, life sciences, and so on. It can help you to quickly sort, search, match, replace, clean and optimise various aspect of your data, and you wouldn’t need to go through any tough learning curves.

I strongly believe, learning and using Bash shell scripting should be the first step if you want to say to Hello! to big data! This course will introduce with some bash-based data mining projects and also with bash scripting, regular expressions, AWK, sed, grep and so on, you name it! I hope you will like it, thanks for enrolling, mate! Do you want to know more about my courses online?

Target audience and prerequisites:

Almost everyone can benefit from learning to use Bash:

• Particularly students who want to learn Bash and the command line to improve their career prospects,
• researchers who want to add Bash and other command line tools to their bag of tricks, and
• scientists who want to learn to explore and analyse the data that their lab generates.

Do you want to learn more?

Feel free to have trip to the ‘Learn Scientific Programming’ initiative.