Context

There are typical guidelines for keeping a notebook of wet-lab work :

1. Record everything you do in the lab, even if you are following a published procedure.
2. If you make a mistake, put a line through the mistake and write the new information next to it.
3. Use a ball point pen so that marks will not smear nor will they be erasable.
4. Use a bound notebook so that tear-out would be visible.
5. When you finish a page, put a corner-to corner line through any blank parts that could still be used for data entry.
6. All pages must be pre-numbered.
7. Write a title for each and every new set of entries.
8. It is critical that you enter all procedures and data directly into your notebook in a timely manner.
9. Properly introduce and summarize each experiment.
10. The investigator and supervisor must sign each page.

But for dry-lab work...

The concept of the notebook is not new, as these quotes show.

Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do. - Donald Knuth (1984)

A literate computing environment is one that allows users not only to execute commands interactively, but also to store in a literate document the results of these commands along with figures and free-form text. - Millman KJ and Perez F (2014)

And the concept was already in place in the 1980s

This notebook concept has evolved since then and in this course we're going to introduce you to three different notebooks:

• Rmarkdown
• Jupyter
• Quarto