A teaching fellow at the University of Michigan once asked me if I could provide some career advice to her nuclear engineering students. I started off with basic industry knowledge but soon came upon computers. When hiring people onto a computational physics team, I always expect a certain level of computer-savvy. But it occurred to me that it’s probably challenging for a young student to catch up on all the classic computer goodies. So I wrote a book about them.
Digital Superpowers hit the shelves of Amazon as an e-book tonight. It covers a bunch of open-source tools in an informal and broad tour, starting simple and building from there. It covers a few computer basics and introduces you to package managers before delving into short and sweet hands-on follow-alongs (and sometimes just drive-bys) with virtual machines, regular expressions, pdf toolkit, TOR, GnuPG encryption, LaTeX, Sphinx, pandoc, graphviz, Imagemagick, GIMP, Inkscape, darktable, Blender, Openshot, Audacity, LMMS, Hydrogen, Mixxx, git, Python, Django, Home Assistant, ESP8266s, Raspberry Pis, and self-hosting (among others).
Try it out and let me know what you think.