Cool - which course is she taking? This is the Computational Investing course. Buried very deep in a forum is a post by the tutor saying that you should know programming and how to use the command line - unfortunately it's too well hidden.
The main struggle has actually been with people on OSX Lion getting the libraries installed.
On the introduction page of this course it states, "This course is intended for folks who have a strong programming background, but who are new to finance and investing."
Hardly well-hidden.
I stand corrected. Maybe there should be a test to weed people out early then. Dunno - there are a few too many people on the forums who don't know the 'cd' command.
I was referring to this little quiz [1] which I thought should be posted directly in the description to scare people off.
[1] http://wiki.quantsoftware.org/index.php?title=Compinvesti-pr...
Definitely a bit more computationally intensive than I would have imagined it to be. That's a bit of a challenge even for some with a CS degree!
Cheers for pointing this course out, though. It's right up my street.
Great! Very interesting stuff (as it's all new to me).
She and another friend of hers was having some troubles understanding when and when not to use parentheses and I did a quick clinic with them to walk through it.
It might be a good idea if volunteers from the Python community could be found to offer extra lessons, perhaps some sort of live video cast mixed with a live chat. It could help out a lot of people who otherwise don't have many people to call on around them.