If you must use Windows, PuTTY is a free ssh client. It also has an scp program and an sftp program for secure copying and ftping. It does not need to be installed. Just download and run the executable. This is extremely highly recommended if you connect to other computers remotely from a Windows machine.
For Windows, check out Cygwin
For Mac OS X (I know it is based on BSD, but it doesn't come with most
of the useful standard Unix stuff) there is Fink.
Astromake (by Peter Teuben) is a tool to load some software on your machine that are not installed by default. This includes PGPlot, a more recent version of Mozilla, the Intel Compilers, and several others. This is for GNU/Linux only.
To use, in your .tcshrc (bash users are on your own), include the
line:
source /astromake/astromake_start
Remember, unless unless you log out and then back in, you must type
source .tcshrc for changes to count. Then, to see what is available, type:
astroload -v
To actually load one of the programs type (or include in you .tcshrc
file) astroload followed by the name of the program you want.
Several of the commonly used programs in the department are IDL, sm, PGPlot, and gnuplot.
This has far more features than any of the other plotting software listed here and can read and write tons of formats. This also makes it the hardest to use for quick little plots. It is big and expensive. If you use it, by far, the single best site about it is Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming. Don't bother with the printed manuals as they are hopelessly out of date (but the online ones which you get to by typing ? in IDL are okay).
This is popular in the department, so there are lots of people to talk to about it. Not free.
This is old school Fortran plotting. Great if you want control over every aspect of your plots and don't care about things like ease of use. If you actually want to use it, you probably want PGPerl. PGplot is used as the backend for programs like WIP, but some people (like me) use it with PGPerl for most of their plotting.
Gnuplot is simple, easy to script, free, but somewhat limited plotting
package. Good for quick plotting. Two good tutorials are at: http://www.cs.uni.edu/Help/gnuplot/
and http://www.duke.edu/~hpgavin/gnuplot.html.
Here is an example data file we can look at.
Here is an example use of gnuplot. To use
this, type gnuplot at your prompt. At the gnuplot prompt, type load
"demo.plot".
Here is the same example, only it
produces a postscript output file.
We can break scripting up into two types: shell scripting and stand alone scripting languages (Perl, Python, etc.). Many people in the department use C Shell scripting, although bash is the more common default shell on most computers these days (both Linux and OS X). C shell scripting has a C like syntax and relies primarily on the use of regular shell commands.
For scripting, I'm going to give some examples using Perl since I
don't do any shell scripting. The best way to learn Perl is with the
book Learning
Perl by Schwartz and Phoenix. Multiple people in the department
have copies, but it is worth buying if you are serious about Perl.
Also helpful is the site www.perldoc.com
Go here for some basic perl