Programming is becoming an increasingly important part of scientific research, yet many scientists are self-taught programmers with little formal training. This means that scientists are often unfamiliar with simple tools that can make programming and dealing with data faster, more reliable and more reproducible.

To follow-on and develop the work of the Effective Scientific Programming workshop held at the University of Newcastle on Monday 20 June 2011, the organising team have set up a web page with the workshop materials and links to additional resources.

A number of discussion groups on popular networking sites, under the tag sci-prog, have also been set up to encourage scientists who have to write programs to share experiences and exchange expertise about programming.

• SCI-PROG on JISCMAIL
• Sci-Prog on Facebook
• SciProg on LinkedIn