Summary and Setup

These pre-exercises are designed to prepare you for working with ROOT files and the broader ROOT analysis library in two separate contexts: editing and running much of the pre-existing code used to access some of the older open data files and then working with more recent, user-friendly python libraries to interface with the output files that you will be creating.

In the first case, you will be editing and/or writing files using C++ and ROOT, and perhaps examining those files with a python interface to ROOT. In the second case, you’ll use some python libraries (uproot and awkward arrays) to read some ROOT files, but then analyze the data with non-ROOT-specific libraries.

This is not a full introduction to C++ or ROOT or uproot/awkward, however, we do take time to explain some key concepts that will help you feel more comfortably working with the open data codebase.

If you run into problems with any of these steps, please reach out to the organizers through the dedicated Mattermost channel.

This lesson requires a computer with an internet connection and a bash shell (either native Linux, MacOs or Windows WSL2 Linux). You should have Docker installed and the Docker pre-exercises finished so that you can access the containers my_root and my_python created as instructed there.