New ROOT student course for self-study

(28 August 2024)

The academic year is about to start, so why not learn ROOT with us?

During the summer, the ROOT team has organized a number of ROOT Summer Student courses at CERN and two HSF/IRIS-HEP Python for Analysis Trainings online, meaning the ROOT community has expanded by around 200 new students! And that is only the beginning; we think more students should have an opportunity to acquire the course material, this time in a self-study manner.

The course is entirely contained within Python Jupyter Notebooks; the material is available on GitHub, while the video recording is here.

The course introduces ROOT and what it is used for by the LHC experiments and the physicists analyzing the data. The following are five sections in which the most essential features of modern ROOT are presented. We start with the bread and butter of every physicist - histograms, graphs and parameter estimation. We then continue with an explanation of the ROOT file format and how to inspect such ROOT files. In the second part of the course, we introduce the ROOT analysis interface - the RDataFrame (RDF). We go through the RDF basics, continue with the use of collections in RDataFrame, and finally, touch on some more advanced yet very useful RDataFrame concepts.

The lecture part of the course is complimented with a number of exercises, some of which we solve together in the video and some of which are left to the students for further exploration after completing the core parts of the course and after going through the extra material (also linked in the student-course repository).

Completing the core part of the course should take at most 3 hours. To profit from the course the most, we suggest that you follow these three steps:

Open the student-course repository and follow the simple setup steps
Watch the video recording and follow along using the Jupyter Notebooks on your PC
In case of issues, questions, or wishes to share feedback, contact us via the ROOT forum

Enjoy and share with your colleagues and friends!