From 6-10 March, a training course will be held at CERN to teach C++ programming skills to particle physicists. The event is called “The 6th HEP C++ Course and Hands-on Training - The Essentials” and is organised jointly by the Software Institute for Data Intensive Sciences and the Training Working Group of the HEP Software Foundation. The goal of the course is to help members of the particle physics community to better contribute to experiments’ code bases or even to write their own analysis software.

The event will run over three days: Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Each day will feature a two-hour interactive lecture in the morning, followed by a two-hour session of related hands-on training exercises in small breakout groups of up to 10 students in the afternoons. The lectures are given by proficient C++ programmers from CERN’s IT-GOV, EP-LBC and EP-SFT groups. Note: the two non-course days (Tuesday and Thursday) may also be used to complete additional exercises.

The event will be held in a hybrid format: morning lectures will be given in a meeting room at CERN (593/R-010) and broadcast over Zoom, while the afternoon sessions will be held in smaller meeting rooms at CERN, as well as in dedicated Zoom breakout rooms for those participating remotely. While remote participation is possible, the organisers encourage to participants to attend the event in person to get the most out of it.

Full details of the training course, including registration, can be found here.

The team behind this event typically organises two such courses per year: an “advanced C++” course is planned for mid-late 2023. In case of interest for future events, a waiting list will be made available in parallel to the registration process for the course in March.