Dear new MSc student,

There is a new addition to the bridge course for MSc students: A
tutorial will be held on informatics fundamentals essential for
programming on Friday the 7th of October from 14:00-16:45. A number of
basic informatics concepts and their application to programming will
be explained, and at the end there will be a simple (and hopefully
enjoyable) exercise in corpus analysis. The exact location is to be
announced.

If you have ANY sort of informatics or programming background, this
course is NOT for you: it is designed for people with no experience
whatsoever. However, it is not an introductory informatics course:
Only the bare theoretical foundations necessary for doing some
effective (but simple) programming will be learnt. Please also note
that although we will be using the Python programming language in this
course, this course is not intended to teach you everything about how
to use Python.

You'll need to bring your own computer to the course; Download the
implementation for Python appropriate for your computer from
http://python.org/download/. Also download the Python language
documentation from http://docs.python.org/download.html. Make sure it
is installed and running correctly on your machine: Test running the
attached "template.py" file (e.g. in the console, go to the directory
you saved it in and enter "python template.py"). Lastly, please get a
plain text file of your choice (e.g. from http://www.gutenberg.org/),
as we will be doing some simple corpus analysis using it. NOTE: Try to
make sure it hasn't got any special non-ASCII characters (e.g. "ü",
"ß", "á").

If you will be there, please do me a favour and send me a message so
that I can estimate how many people will come.

Best,
Todd Shore