Stefano’s talk at the Harvard Medical School
Thank you to Brad Coleman and the Curriculum Fellows Program for inviting Stefano to the Harvard Medical School. Stefano’s presentation about the class, the book, and the boot camp is available here.
Why are there so few figures?
So, how come there are so few figures in Computing Skills for Biologists – A Toolbox? Moreover, why are there exactly zero in the chapter on visualizing data? The irony is not lost on Stefano and me. The reason is that we wrote a book for graduate students and we wanted to price it for graduate students. Including just a single color image in the book would have made the book a lot more expansive.
In short, we could have included black and white graphics in the visualization chapter. However, that would have severely limited our ability to introduce some topics and features that rely on plotting with colors. Printing these in black and white might have been of little use. Instead, we reasoned that learners see the resulting graphics on their computer when they type the code in the book. Furthermore, learners can compare their results with a pdf that shows all code and graphics. This pdf comes with the book’s repository and is available for download here.
Please comment below if you think we should include color graphics in future editions of the book or if you appreciate the book’s reasonable price.