Better Code, Better Science

An open-source book on building better code for science using AI.

Authors: Russ Poldrack, others TBD.

Content will be posted on Substack and added here as it is released.

A rendered version of the complete book is available at https://poldrack.github.io/BetterCodeBetterScience/.

Table of contents (see here for a more detailed roadmap)

• Introduction
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
• Essential Tools and Techniques
  • Part 1: Version control
  • Part 2: Large Language Models
  • Part 3: Managing environments
• Principles of Software Engineering
  • Part 1: Intro
  • Part 2: Clean Coding
  • Part 3: Modularity and the "God object"
  • Part 4: Global variables
  • Part 5: Defensive coding
  • Part 6: Coding portably
  • Part 7: Technical debt
• Project Structure and Management
• Coding with AI
• Software Testing
• Validating Scientific Analyses
• Optimizing Performance
• Data Organization and Management
• Workflow Management
• High-Performance Computing
• Sharing Research Objects