Welcome to the Student Computing Guide! This guide to computing at Statistics Department, Rice University is based on a guide created by many previous and current graduate students and faculty, with the need of incoming students in mind. It is meant to give new students a clear view of the computing facilities that Rice has to offer and how to make maximum use of them. It also gives introductions to various software and accommodations about how to use them.
Chapter two summarizes the computing facilities on campus and how to access them. This is most useful to new students and the summary table given in the last section can be used as a checklist. The following chapters covers several aspects of our daily computing tasks including printing, email, web pages, computation, word processing and remote access. Although there are many ways to do the same thing and the choice of software can be very personal, most commonly used software are introduced and basic information about how to obtain, set up and use them are given. Whenever possible, further references, mostly URLs, are given so that you can make use of guides for specific topics from many other resources. If you need more information, `googling' the keywords will usually give you what you need.
You will notice that this guide covers more Unix software than windows. This is partly because there is less software for windows than for Unix (for statistics use), also because windows software is easier to use thus needs less introduction, while Unix applications, though more powerful and more flexible, have steeper learning curves.
This guide is under constant maintenance and any contribution will be highly appreciated. The newest HTML version of it will be put under the helpdesk http://www.stat.rice.edu/ helpdesk/compguide. Printer friendly (unfriendly to trees :-) versions are in one-page HTML http://www.stat.rice.edu/ helpdesk/compguide/compguide-single.html, postscript http://www.stat.rice.edu/ helpdesk/compguide/compguide.ps and pdf http://www.stat.rice.edu/ helpdesk/compguide/compguide.pdf format.