To get started and work through the tutorials I post on this site you will need the following essentials.
Hardware
1. A computer
A computer, Ideally with a Linux operating system or partition.
Most bioinformatic tools require at least 4GB of RAM, but the more RAM the better. You will need to ensure that your computer has both Python and R installed.
2. Access to an HPC.
If you are working in genomics or with any big data a high performance compute cluster will be where you run most of your analyses, usually you have access to an HPC via your university or workplace, you can also use cloud computing eg Amzon’s AWS if you do not have access to these.
There is also the Galaxy platform which is a free, open source platform where you can run large jobs on the Galaxy HPC’s.
Why Linux?
Linux is based on the Unix operating system and is completely open source.
As a result many academic institutions make good use of this free resource. Many if not most bioinformatic command-line tools created by the academic community are open source and designed to run on Linux operating systems, this means learning to use a Linux machine is a very useful bioinformatic skill.
Software
There are many bioinformatic tools available, for now we will stick to the software needed to learn bioinformatics skills.
The most important software that you need for now are the scientific environments, Spyder (a python scientific environment) and Rstudio (an R scientific environment)
What is a scientific environment and why do we want to use them?
Scientific environments like Spdyer and Rstudio provide a visual space, helping you to write and test your code in one place. These environments are used by programmers at all different levels.
How/where can I get Spyder and Rstudio?
If you are using Ubuntu, both Spyder and Rstudio can be installed from the software centre (see Getting started with R and Rstudio and Getting started with Python and Spyder).