Markdown homeworks

In SD211 you were introduced to markdown as part of learning Jupyter notebooks. Markdown is a simple plain-text formatting language that is used on many websites (including this one!) and we will also use it in this class to submit written homework assignments.

For the purposes of homeworks, it’s really easy. Just download the file for this homework to your sd212 directory, then open it in VS Code to fill in the answers. Hit save and then turn it in to the submit system.

When editing the file, do not change the lines that start with ## and have something like [Q01]. Those indicate where your answers for each question begin or end. The questions themselves are restated in lines that start with > which will be ignored for grading purposes.

Do this first

• Look over the course policy, especially the beginning parts about grading, deadlines, late policy, and collaboration.

• Register to access O’Reilly online (which we will use for some of the textbook readings for this class). USNA has a free institutional subscription that you can use to access these for free!

  First go to O’Reilly and register for an account using your USNA email address. You will probably have to choose another password to remember; sorry…

  Once your O’Reilly account is activated log in to O’Reilly here. You should now be able to access the textbooks linked from the course policy.

• Get your computing environment setup for SD212 by following the instructions here.

  If you already have things working from SD211 last semester, there is not much more to do. Look for the part on how to set up your sd212 directory in WSL on your laptop, and then follow the steps to install Mamba in an Ubuntu terminal on your laptop.

Questions to answer

Download the file hw01.md to fill in and submit for this homework

1. What name do you want to go by in class? (Please spell it out phonetically as well so I can be sure to pronounce it correctly!)

2. In just a few sentences, tell me why you are a data science major.

3. Which aspect of Python programming do you feel most confident about coming in from last semester?

4. What aspect of Python do you feel least confident about and would like to review more?

5. What is something interesting or different you found in the SD212 course policy?

6. Use your O’Reilly login to open The Linux Command Line, one of our textbooks.

   Navigate to Chapter 4, “Manipulating Files and Directories”.

   To check that you actually did this, type the word right before the exclamation point at the end of the first sentence in this chapter.

7. After installing mamba and the sd212 environment as instructed above, open a terminal and type run the following two commands:

   mamba activate sd212
   mamba info

   This should give you a bunch of information. To check that it worked correctly, paste as an answer to this question what mamba says is the “active env location”. (Copy everything after the colon on that line.)

   (You should be able to do this wherever you installed mamba, either on your laptop using Ubuntu WSL or over SSH on midn.cs.)

Submit command

To submit files for this homework, run one of these commands:

submit -c=sd212 -p=hw01 hw01.md 
club -csd212 -phw01 hw01.md